A Key to the Suite

by John D. MacDonald

  Several of the corporations, including AGM, had rented pool area cabanas for the duration of the convention. These were the gathering places for the rather small contingent of wives of delegates. They lay on the casually grouped chaises, greased themselves constantly, gossiped, practiced corporate gamesmanship, ordered tall rum drinks and made agonizing decisions about what to do with the rest of the day—such as to go shopping or take a nap or play cards.

  Amid the forenoon silences on the third floor, north wing, several salesmen of a company which makes large industrial pumps, were in danger of strangling on their own attempts to laugh without making a sound while they played an innocent game on one of their shyer associates. They stood outside the door of the company suite looking along forty feet of corridor to where the most inveterate practical joker of the group stood, tensed and furtive, within reach of one of the big aluminum housekeeping carts. The cart stood outside one of the rooms. The door of the room was ajar. At intervals of almost a minute, the joker would reach out, grasp the pull-bar of the cart and shake it, so that the soiled glasses and the containers of cleaning materials would jingle and clatter. Each time he did so, the observers would clutch each other and make small groaning sounds as they tried to stifle their intense amusement.

  Earlier that morning, an enterprising one in the group had discovered that the maid for that end of the corridor was available for special service, at ten dollars a throw. She had obliged the others of the group in turn, all except the shy one. The romantic aspects of it left something to be desired. She was a tall Austrian girl with ginger hair, a sharp nose, bulging blue eyes, a turkey neck, a heavy accent, meager breasts and round heavy hips.

  There were rules to be obeyed, ja? The door, it has to be open. The cart, it must be outside door always. And the cleaning schedule, it must be kept, ja?

  After she had decided to take the risk of a multiple income, she had stowed her panties under the stack of clean towels on the housekeeping cart. She was too much in terror of the housekeeper to risk removing her gray and white nylon uniform. So she hitched it high, and performed with a strenuousness partially motivated by panic, and kept her eye on the room door at all times.

  They had, with difficulty, talked the shy one into taking his turn. He had been very dubious about the open door.

  Suddenly the joker tensed, whirled and came sprinting soundlessly along the corridor. The five salesmen erupted into the suite, gasping, hugging themselves. The joker, eyes streaming, said, “She … she cussed him out in kraut … and she … she said she couldn’t waste … any more time. Shh, you guys. He’s coming.”

  The shy one walked in. He looked troubled. They asked him how it was. “Damn it. Every time I’d get set, some goddam noise in the hall would …” One of the salesmen could contain himself no longer and burst into a high wild guffaw that started the others going. The shy one stared at them with growing comprehension, then gave a roar of anger and charged the nearest one and made an almost alarmingly successful attempt to hurl his tormentor through the nearest window. At the expense of one split lip and one minor nosebleed, they finally pinned him down and sat on him until he had cooled off.

  Out at the Pagoda Bar, beyond the Olympic pool, a florid sales manager decided after three Bloody Marys that he couldn’t face the idea of lunch, and the only thing to do with his hangover was take it back to bed and hope it would be gone by late afternoon. He looked at all the flesh exposed to the sun and fancied he could hear it sizzling. Two couples went away, leaving just two people at the bar for the moment, the sales manager and a dark-haired woman in a white bathing suit. She was deeply tanned, her shoulders gleaming with oil and perspiration. She was plain but pretty enough, and she looked bored. She was four stools away. He looked at her thighs, where the brown flesh bulged as it escaped the stricture of the swimsuit fabric. He was conscious of her having glanced over at him a few times. Never when you want one, he thought. Always when you don’t. On a weary impulse, courting rejection, he took his room key out of his pocket, held it under the level of the bar, rapped it against the wood to attract her attention, then held it so she could read the number on the plastic tag, looking at her with a fixed stare of inquiry and defiance.

  She looked away quickly, her lips thinning, her face darkening slightly. He felt relief. He signed the check, left a tip and turned to go. The woman coughed. He turned and looked at her. She stared at him without expression and gave him a single abrupt nod of agreement. As he started the enormous journey to his room, he focused his mind hopelessly on the memory of the bulge of thigh, trying to summon up visions of delight, anticipation, but feeling only the weariness of too many hotels, too many conventions, too many million miles back and forth across the land, too many women, so many that now the memories of all of them had merged at last into a single unstimulating vision, white, gasping, fatty, strap-marked and secondhand.

  Six

  LITTLE MISS CORY BARLUND came out of the eighth floor elevator at eleven thirty, paused to orient herself, and then began walking down the carpeted corridor that led to the AGM suite. She had the lithe walk of a model, all control, nothing sexy, nothing obvious. She wore her best “little nothing” dress, a junior dress, sleeveless, with a high collar, beltless, of such a calculatedly casual fit that it clung where and when it should, and swung free when it should, clinging and touching and releasing in the rhythm of her chin-high stride and the small movement of her toffee hair. The dress was the color of milk sherry. Her shoes were white and her small purse was white, and she wore gloves that matched the sherry dress perfectly. There were little gold buttons in her pierced ears. Her nylons were sheer as cobwebs, and latched to a riband of garter belt. Her panties were lace and her half bra was an A cup, and the aromatic redolence of the perfume behind her ears and on her wrists and between her breasts was forty dollars the ounce.

  She moved down the corridor and kept herself from thinking by focusing on a pleasant sensual awareness of the slight movements of the fabric touching her body and the rhythmic little thump of the camera pack against her hip, dangling from the narrow strap over her right shoulder.

  When she was more than halfway down the corridor, a door not far in front of her opened and Dave Daniels came out. He started to close the door, then noticed her. Unshaved, he was in shirt sleeves, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. She nodded coldly and tried to move around him, but he blocked her passage.

  She backed up a few steps and said, “Let me by, please.”

  “After I tell you you’re not kidding me a bit. I got an instinct. I always know the score.”

  “Did you start drinking again? Or are you still drunk, Mr. Daniels?”

  “Come on in and talk it over.”

  “Not today. Not any day.”

  He reached for her but she backed up swiftly. She said calmly, “You’re an idiot, Daniels. How much do you think you can get away with? I took voice lessons for five years. I know how to breathe and how to project. If you touch me, I could make a noise that would open every door on this floor. And if you bother me one more time, I’m going to explain to all the rest of them that I have to drop the article because you’re making it too difficult for me.”

  Daniels leaned against the corridor wall. “So what will work?”

  “Give up.”

  “But now I got you on my mind.”

  “And that will be a terrible source of worry and concern to me, Mr. Daniels,” she said, and walked past him and on down the corridor. He watched her intently until she turned into the suite, and then he went back into his room, lifted the bourbon bottle and drank from it until an involuntary gag closed his throat. “I’m Dave Daniels,” he said thickly. “I never miss. One way or another, I never miss. Never have. Never will.”

  It was quarter of twelve when Floyd Hubbard, nearing the open door of the AGM suite, heard and recognized Cory’s laugh. Though her voice was light and almost frail, her laugh, as he had noticed the previous evening, was full-bodied, earthy, as if
she had borrowed it from a more vigorous woman. The laugh moved his heart up into the peak of his chest, and he swallowed it back down.

  She was in the suite with Bobby Fayhouser, Charlie Gromer and Les Lewis, and she was taking a picture of the three road men against the background of the small AGM exhibit which had been set up in the suite. The flash attachment made its quick white flicker of light, and she turned and smiled at him, winding the film as she turned. “Hi, Floyd. I want one of you too, even though I don’t know what you do yet. Bobby and Les have been telling me that for their jobs, AGM picks only those men who show potential top executive abilities.”

  “Now hold it!” Bobby said. “That’s what Les told you, Cory. I’ve been told I’m as far as I’m ever going to get. Mr. Hubbard is more the executive type. All the home office operations, except sales, have been moved to Houston, and that’s where he is.”

  “Move over by the couch, Floyd,” she said. “About there. What is your title, really?”

  “I’m an administrative assistant to the executive assistant to the assistant to the vice president.”

  “It won’t fit under the picture,” she said. “I’ll make you a vice president. Hold still. Turn your head a little bit away from me. There!”

  “I’m immortalized,” Floyd said.

  “If it comes out good, you can get extra copies from the magazine.”

  “No pictures of me ever come out good. I always look like a mechanic who just got promoted to service manager. Joe’s Garage.”

  Just at that moment, Jesse Mulaney arrived with a group, and the road men sprang into action, fixing drinks, reading badges, memorizing names. Frick came in with some more strangers. Hubbard maneuvered Cory over into an area of some limited privacy and said, “Now you can say it.”

  “Say what, darling? Good morning?”

  “No. You’re supposed to say the sea breeze made you giddy, so kindly ignore the whole thing, phone call included.”

  “Look at me, Floyd. Look right into my eyes. What do you think?”

  “I think they’re not completely blue. There’s little brownish dots in the blue, close to the pupil.”

  “Idiot! Stop being evasive. What else does it … do to you?”

  “It … it makes me think we’re going to have to do a lot of talking to talk this to death.”

  “I know. But we have to, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because we’re grownups, aren’t we, Floyd? And because of Jan.”

  “You better look away, honey, because I can’t seem to move a muscle.”

  “And I couldn’t sleep. And all the way here, I couldn’t take a deep breath.”

  “Cut it out!”

  She turned away slightly. “It isn’t fair it should be worse today, darling. It’s supposed to be less.”

  “Go take pictures. Go interview people.”

  “Yes, master,” she said, and gave him a wicked and knowing grin, and walked over to where Cass Beatty stood talking to two other men. She took a letter out of her purse and gave it to Cass. He read it quickly, smiled, and put it in his pocket. Several minutes later Floyd saw him showing it to Mulaney.

  Frick came over to where Hubbard stood alone and said, “Say, I saw you down there sitting in on that workshop crap this morning. You don’t have to let yourself in for that sort of stuff, Floyd. Like I tell my boys, it’s a lot of window dressing to make it look as if the convention is accomplishing something. Nobody ever gets anything out of that crud.”

  “I guess it was interesting to me because it was new to me.”

  Frick nudged him. “Like the man says, try everything once. You know, some outfits make their boys attend. That’s why there was a showing down there. But like Jesse says, nobody ever learned to sell by listening to somebody else talk about it.”

  “You can either sell or you can’t?”

  Frick looked at him with vague suspicion. “Well, there’s some things you can teach, the way I teach my boys, going right out there with them. And I guess some of the manuals don’t actually hurt anybody. But whenever one of our boys comes back from special training, the first thing I tell him is forget … I mean … uh …”

  “The practical, realistic outlook, eh?”

  Frick seemed heartened. “You hit it right on the button, Floyd. The best school is the school of hard knocks.” He punched Hubbard’s arm. “Everybody’s here to have a time. So stay loose. At the conventions, fella, everything goes.”

  Hubbard did not have a chance to talk to Cory again until after the official lunch. When they went down, she rode with another group in a separate elevator. At lunch she was at an adjoining table. He felt vaguely irritated that she should be having such an obviously hilarious time talking to Carmer on one side of her, and Cass Beatty on the other. The two AGM wives were not there. He was seated between Charlie Gromer and Dave Daniels. Gromer was too wary of him to want to say very much, and Daniels was so woodenly drunk it required all his concentration to appear undrunk. The speaker was reasonably amusing, but his talk was too long.

  As the big room emptied, he kept an eye on Cory, and moved in from the flank after she had reached the lobby. Carmer seemed reluctant to part company with her, but she solved it by putting her hand out and saying, “It was such fun talking to you, Tom. I hope it’ll happen again soon.”

  As she turned to Floyd she said, “I knew it was you standing there. I’ve acquired a brand new seventh sense, darling. I’ve known just where you’ve been every moment.”

  They moved over toward the wall. “Where do we start killing it with conversation?” he asked. “In a bar? By the pool? Some public place.”

  She tilted her head to the side. “I’ve got to find a place to change film, dear. I’m at the end of a roll. It’s very sensitive. I have to have complete darkness. I can change it by touch. I looked in the girls’ room, but there’s no place there. There’s no window in your bathroom, is there?”

  “No.”

  “We could go up there first, and then think of a place to talk.”

  “How smart is that, Cory?”

  “You mean being seen?”

  “No, I don’t mean being seen, and you know it.”

  She sighed. “I guess it isn’t smart. Okay. Give me your key, dear. Where shall I meet you?”

  “I’ll hang around here.”

  She took the key. “It won’t take me five minutes.” She winked at him. “Coward!”

  “I warned you.”

  He sat in a lobby chair. He waited five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. After twenty minutes had passed, he went up to his room. He rapped on the door. It opened a small cautious way, and then swung wide. She walked away from him to stand by the terrace door, her back to the room.

  He closed the room door and said, “Uh … get your film changed?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said in a small rusty voice.

  “Well … I wondered what was keeping you.”

  “I was just going to come back down. I took … some time out for tears.”

  He walked close to her, put his hands on her shoulders. “Tears?”

  She shrugged his hands off and moved a step away. “For no good reason, I guess.”

  “Come on, Cory. What’s the matter?”

  She whirled and stared angrily at him. “Why do we have to be so damn scrupulous and decent? Who knows what’s going to happen to anybody in the world tomorrow? Why do I have to be cheated? I’ve been cheated out of too much in my life.” Her face twisted. “So I’m shameless. I want to go to bed with you. Please, please, please.” She hurled herself at him, and he held her trembling body. With her face against his throat, she said, “Would it just be so terribly cheap it would spoil everything? Is it too soon?”

  For an instant a ridiculous image came into his mind, a fragment of an old movie comedy, a man on the rickety wing of a high-flying airplane carefully pinching his nose before leaping wildly into space.

  “Not cheap,” he said. “And not s
oon.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes,” and looked at him gravely, intently, stepped to the drapery cords, yanking the pumpkin draperies closed to fill the room with orange light, like a room at the edge of some giant furnace.

  When he saw her nude, there was a virginal economy about her figure, but all smoothly sheathed, all projection of bone muted, sleekly functional as a seal. The feel of her when she slid into his arms made him gasp for breath. The texture of her was dry, smooth, firm and curiously heated, like silk fresh from the iron.

  • • •

  When he awoke it was dark, and the tall ceramic lamp on the table between the beds was on. He awoke with no memory of having gone to sleep, and no memory of when the lamp had been turned on, or who had done it. He looked at his watch and saw that it was a quarter to nine. He was on his back, and felt as if the whole area from his heart to his knees had been hollowed out, leaving only a papery husk which would collapse if he moved without caution.

  She sprawled asleep on the neighbor bed, prone, her face toward him in the lamplight, breathing deeply and slowly through the slack swollen lips. Her delicate face had a puffed, strained, misused look, a residue of fevers. In the thickets of recent memory he saw that face, moving in the pumpkin light now gone, at all angles and distances, always with the same look, glazed, deadened, intent, the eyes half closed, the mouth wider. And he heard the sounds, the nasal petulant whining when all was not just as she wanted it, and the rhythmic coughing gasps when things went well for her.

  His mind drifted, forlorn, trying to find analogies which could help him perceive the relationship and understand what had happened. He felt that sense of loss one has when someone dear has died, and in a little while he understood he mourned the loss of Cory, the fictitious Cory of the sea breeze and the phone call. He missed a girl named Cory, forever gone.