A Man of Affairs

by John D. MacDonald

  “Bonny and me want to get off this island too,” Bundy said with unexpected belligerence.

  Bowman looked at him calmly. “I’m certain Cam will be glad to make similar arrangements.”

  “Right,” Cam said. “But you ought to remember, Bundy, we’ve got some oil people coming in next week.”

  “The hell with them,” Bundy said. “I’d rather scrabble around for angels in the city. We’re not doing any good here. It’s May already and we haven’t even got a house lined up,”

  Louise and I said our tender farewells on a settee on the veranda not far from my room door. She wore a dark dress and had managed to acquire the look of a woman in mourning for a dearly beloved husband.

  “I have thanked God a hundred times that I didn’t tell him I wanted a divorce. Then I would have had to blame myself.”

  “Very lucky,” I said.

  She took my hand in both of hers and held it. “You’re a sweet guy, Sam. But it must have been madness.”

  “You mean we could never have found happiness.”

  “That’s right, my darling,” she said, tears standing in her beautiful eyes, her perfect features like ancient ivory.

  Tommy had clued me, and I had read the rest of it in her face when she had looked at her dead husband. She had to hurt. She had to be martyred. She fed on unhappiness. And now she would give me up gladly because she had the juiciest role of her life. She would soon come to believe that hers had been a perfect marriage. She would edit her memories until Warren lost all the whisky bloat, until he had never looked at another woman. And then she would be a darkly tragic figure with a story in which there was a delicious touch of the macabre. In the prime of his life, in the fullness of their love, her darling husband had been killed by barracuda. Or would it become sharks in time? And she could drift through the old house, and nurse her tragedy in her walled garden, and be deliciously miserable all the days of her life.

  I was tempted to tell her just what she was doing, but I remembered the look in Bundy’s eyes as I had turned away from him after speaking my little piece. If she wanted to hoke it up, the least I could do was play along.

  So I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it and said, “I’ll spend the rest of my life thinking of what might have been.” I did not mention the intense relief I would feel whenever I would think of it.

  “You’re a dear, Sam. I’ll see you back home, of course, but we will be very correct with each other, won’t we?”

  “No matter how difficult it is.”

  “That’s a promise?”

  “Yes, Louise. It’s a promise.”

  When the Try Again left the dock with the body stowed below, Louise sat huddled in one of the fishing chairs, and it occurred to me as I looked at the fine bone structure of her face that she was going to make a very handsome old lady. Tommy lifted a brown arm in salute and we waved back.

  “The party shrinks,” Bridget said. “Walk me up the beach a way, Sam’l.”

  “Pleasure.”

  “You know,” she said, “it makes me think of a cartoon by Abner Dean that I saw a few years ago. It shows these people in a living room, sitting in a circle on the floor with their arms around each other, about eight or ten of them, and they are all sort of melted into each other in a kind of nasty way. They’ve built a bonfire in the middle on the rug, and the caption says, ‘After the others have left, how did we all get so wonderful?’ ”

  “Are we all so wonderful?”

  “Maybe I think of the cartoon because we’re all so unwonderful. Damn these sandals. Sand comes in the toes.”

  “What’s the matter with us, Dr. Hallowell?”

  “Easy question. We’re phonies, every one. Those big horrible holes in Warren were reality. And we’re so damn far from the realities we weren’t really willing to admit that it had happened. It was just a bad line in the script. Hey, Joe, let’s shoot this bit over. It don’t fit the story line, buddy.”

  “Who is the phoniest phony?”

  “Another easy question. You must want I should win the big jackpot. Guy Brainerd. I lay sleepless on my trundle bed last night and figured him out and why I was attracted to him. You see, he’s in the most cynical and potentially dangerous business in the world. Telling people what to think and what to believe. It has been frightening me ever since I’ve been in it, which isn’t long. It’s the power that frightens me. There’s more power in Manhattan, more power over the human mind, than in any city since the dawn of time. Just suppose, Sam, that every public relations firm, every advertising agency, and every press agent and every columnist joined a concerted effort, a co-ordinated effort to convince the nation that … oh, say that everybody is entitled to one homicide a year. They’d sell it, Sam. They’d sell it big. And it would sure cut hell out of the population.”

  “I can’t see Guy as dangerous.”

  “Oh, but he is! I told you I was uneasy. I felt guilty about the little distortions you feed the public. But, by God, Guy was so sincere about it. I felt he had latched on to some greater truth, some massive justification for what he was doing that far out-weighed all my petty little fears. I so needed his reassurance, that I made a transference and told myself I needed him. But you know the truth of the matter? Guy has no special justification. He’s just sold himself utterly and completely on the idea that he is doing a Good Thing. He’s a shrewd and self-righteous and utterly stupid man. He hasn’t a trace of cynicism. He’s the high priest of his own mission. And those are the dangerous ones, Sam. Could we please sit on that nice soft rock over there?”

  As soon as we sat down she said, “So I’m quitting.”

  “Why?”

  “As a futile gesture, of course. Why else? I’m not going to quit so I can write a great American novel. I’m going to go back to freelance articles and fiction and do my damndest within my own limitations to keep them honest.”

  “Can you make out at it?”

  “Meagerly.”

  “So who is phony number two?”

  “Mike Dean. The complete cynic. He’d sell his mother’s store teeth to buy corn on the cob. Then maybe Bowman, the iron virgin. Cam has sold himself, but he’s wryly aware of same. He’s the best of the team that I’ve met. They’ve got some real horrors on the squad up in New York.”

  I held my hand out. “Meet another horror, m’am.”

  She looked at me blankly for a moment, and then looked at me with a contempt that hurt. “Not you, Sam. But now that you mention it, I can see it. It’s beginning to show. You sold out.”

  So I told her how and for how much. I didn’t color it. I gave a straight factual report. I told her what would happen. When I was through she didn’t speak. She didn’t look at me. She got up and walked on up the beach. She didn’t walk fast, but she walked steadily until she was out of sight around the point.

  If you want a third of a million dollars, there are some things you have to give up.

  NINE

  So it was Saturday afternoon, and it was hot, and the breeze was dying, and there were nine of us left on the island, plus the staff. Nine little Indians. I sat on my rock and I looked at the empty shore and I wondered if I should follow Bridget and I decided it would not do a damn bit of good. Nor would it do any good to wait there until she passed me on her way back. I stood up and picked up an empty sun-white conch shell and threw it out as far as I could. My shoulder creaked and my arm went slightly dead. Take me out of the game, coach. I can’t put that high hard one close in against the letters any more. All I’ve got left is the slider and the change-up. With the meat of the batting order coming to the plate.

  I walked back to the house. There was just enough hangover left to make me sweat heavily in the heat. I kept my eyes nearly closed against the painful shimmer of light and heat. Amparo Blakely sat alone at the pool in the shade of an umbrella, reading. I hesitated and then went to the pool, feeling like a large unhappy dog that’s willing to try anything in order to get scratched behind the ears. Maybe I n
eeded that aura of dignity and competence and controlled warmth that she radiated. Or maybe I wanted to hear some answers without having to ask the questions. She wore a pale gray skirt and a copper colored blouse that accentuated the coppery glints in her brown hair. I realized that, of the entire group, when we had been complete, Cam Duncan, Porter Crown and Amparo Blakely were the only ones who had never appeared in swim clothes or sun clothes. I fancied Amparo would have looked rather well in either. There was an Amazonian abundance and maturity to her figure that was emphasized by the narrowness of her waist.

  When I sat opposite her without invitation, she put her thumb in her book and looked at me through dark green lenses and smiled.

  “Keep on reading,” I told her.

  “I tried to find something gay, but it just seems silly.”

  “Where are the rest of the troops?”

  “Resting, I guess. I can’t seem to get Warren Dodge out of my mind. God knows I’ve seen enough gore. I’ve seen them brought in in sickening condition. But this seemed more terrible. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve lost my detachment.”

  “It seems odd for you to have been a nurse.”

  “Does it?” she asked coolly.

  “I don’t mean it that way, Amparo. I mean that once you’re a nurse you keep on being a nurse, usually, or get married or something.”

  “Are you asking for a personal history, Sam?”

  “Hell, I guess I’m just making talk. Now that I’m a member of the team, maybe I’m just trying to get acquainted.”

  “All right. I was a nurse. I had a child, how do they say it, without benefit of clergy. I could have not had him, but I wanted him. He’s sixteen now, and I visit him sometimes, and I’m quite certain he has never recognized me or ever will. I went back to nursing, but I couldn’t make enough to keep myself, and also keep him out of a state institution. I took secretarial training. For his sake, I had to be the best, or I’d be back in the same box. I went with Mike Dean ten years ago when I was thirty. My son is in a good private institution. I have a good bit of money laid away. Any questions?”

  “I’m sorry. It wasn’t any of my business.”

  After about ten seconds of silence, she said, “I’m sorry too, Sam. I shouldn’t have been so bitchy about it. That thing today upset me. I kept thinking that if I wasn’t so rusty, I might have been able to find that artery. And I guess I’m wondering if … I wouldn’t mean more to myself if I went back to nursing. I loved it, you know.”

  “What you’re doing is meaningless?”

  “It’s a different kind of meaning. I guess it’s like a big gambling game. You put the chips on the right number and you win. And somebody loses. It’s Mike’s world. I can’t picture him in any other kind of world. I’m not being disloyal when I say it’s more his world than mine. I mean that I can’t ever take it with the same dreadful seriousness he does. Birth and death and pain are the serious things, the meaningful things. We don’t have any of those. Except figuratively.”

  “The pain and death of the Harrison Corporation?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  I closed my hand around my leg just above the knee, and felt the hard flesh, the solid meat, and thought of the blood and nerve fibers under the browning skin; and I thought of the way Warren’s arm had looked, as if a piece of it had been torn out by a garden trowel.

  “Maybe,” I said, “I’m having a little current difficulty trying to figure out what the real things are. For me.”

  “Don’t think too much, Sam.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She had an odd expression. “Just think about the rules of the game you’ll be in. Don’t think about whether the game itself is … significant.”

  “And then I will be able to be very, very happy.”

  “Cam thinks a little bit too much,” she said. “And it makes him restless.”

  “I’m restless because I feel like a Judas goat.”

  She looked startled. “That’s a phrase Cam uses. And he smiles that crookedy smile of his and says that they always let the Judas goat out of the pen, because there’s always another flock for him to lead.”

  “It makes me restless.”

  “And you’re being very well paid for feeling restless, Sam. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  I took that little thought back to my room. I lay down with it. And I told myself that wrassling with angels had gone out of fashion. It is a croo-ell world, and you run like hell to stay in the same place, and you get your marks for performance. I would comfort myself with the knowledge that I was still helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. I could drop the trustworthy and loyal, and after a little while they wouldn’t even be missed.

  And I knew a hundred guys who would give away their hope of heaven for the chance I had walked into. And grabbed.

  Anyway, Mike would keep me so damn busy there would be no thinking time.

  And six months from now, Harrison would be a vague memory. There was no reason why I’d ever have to go back. I was going to move in the big time, in fast company. Isn’t it the business and the duty of a man to get ahead? Why should I go out of my way to retain the great opportunity of carrying Dolson on my back?

  And who the hell was this Bridget Hallowell character to look at me with contempt? She was emotionally unstable. She’d proved she was a pushover. She hadn’t grown up yet. She saw things as black and white. When you grow up you know that everything comes in shades of gray. And now, at last, I was all grown up and on my way. With no room or time for baggage like Bridget.

  I had built myself a little platform and because it was new it felt slightly tippy, but very soon I would get used to it and stand squarely upon it.

  At five-thirty I showered and dressed and headed out to the pool. Bowman was there, and Guy Brainerd and Elda Garry, and Amparo and Bonny Carson and Bundy.

  Sometimes I am very unperceptive about social situations. When kicked under a table I have been known to say, “Why are you kicking me?” But it took me only about ten seconds to realize that something drastic had happened just before I arrived. Bonny Carson had an almost hysterical case of the guffaws. Bundy looked like an amused weasel. Amparo was biting her lip and looking worried. Elda Garry was a picture of rigid, outraged indignation. Guy Brainerd had the lost and stricken look of a man who has been unexpectedly disemboweled—and just about the same coloring. Bowman was looking at Guy Brainerd with an expression of icy and concentrated fury that I would not have thought him capable of.

  “Scotch on the rocks,” I said to John. “Did I miss something, people?”

  “If you had half the sense God gave earthworms,” Bowman said to Guy, “you would never have brought her down here. You were told that you should assign no one to the Dean account in whom you did not have perfect trust and confidence.”

  “But I had no idea she …”

  “That’s the point. You had no idea, Brainerd.”

  Elda said, with a silky venom, “It would be of enormous comfort to all of us, Bonny, if you could stop making that ridiculous noise.” Bonny muffled it somewhat, but it did not stop. Elda turned to Bowman. “I’m sure this isn’t Guy’s fault, Mr. Bowman. But I am certain that I can speak for the editorial staff of Blend when I say that if that person goes ahead with what she plans, we should drop this current project.”

  Bowman studied her for a few moments. “You can’t speak for anybody, honey. You can’t even speak for yourself. If we decide to go ahead with the Dean story in Blend, it will appear in Blend. Don’t sell yourself the pretty little fiction that you’re deciding anything. Before you get rash, just check through all your issues of last year and count the number of pages of advertising from firms in which Mike has a financial interest.”

  She turned pale and said, “You can’t talk to me like this.”

  “Stay out of the conversation, Miss Garry, or you’ll hear some more unpleasant facts.”

  Sh
e jumped up and walked briskly toward the house, bracelets jingling, blond bun bouncing. This time the shorts were rust red, and the pert little rear end managed somehow to express fury and indignation.

  Guy jumped up to follow her.

  “Hold it!” Bowman said.

  Guy stopped and turned and made a helpless gesture and said, “She’s very sensitive. You hurt her.”

  “Then follow her and comfort her.” Bowman waited until he had taken two steps and added, “And kiss our contract good-by.”

  Guy stopped again. He turned and gave Bowman a helpless look. It was unnecessary cruelty, embarrassing to watch. Bowman made him come back and sit down.

  “What are you trying to do to me?” Guy said.

  “Apparently you want to keep the contract.”

  “I … I’d like to. We’ve worked together for …”

  “And now you’ve pulled a boner that maybe you can’t fix. And it will undo any good you may have done in the past. Keep that in mind. And try to figure out just what you’re going to do about it. Now you can run along and fondle your lady editor and dry her tears, but don’t let it take your mind off the problem.”

  Guy Brainerd was a fair-sized man, but when he left he seemed to scuttle.

  “Wouldn’t somebody fill me in?” I asked, as John handed me my drink on a tray.

  Bowman seemed to notice me for the first time since I had joined the group. He studied me for a moment, picked up a piece of white paper from the table and turned away, saying, “Come with me, Glidden.”

  We went to the farthest table, out of earshot of the others. He handed me the piece of white paper. We sat down and I read it. It was neatly typed. The title was centered. THE MIKE DEAN STORY.