Please Write for Details

by John D. MacDonald

  Paul Klauss stared at her for a frozen moment and then came lithely to his feet.

  “Buenos días, señor,” Margarita said in her joyous and piercing voice. “Dispénsame, pero quiere dos de estas limpias? ¿Dónde están las sucias?”

  Paul gave her expert inspection. Young, possibly too young. Gay and confident. Something pathetic about the unsuitable, slutty red dress and those too-large shoes. At her throat was a cross on a chain that could mean trouble. And, of course, there was a language barrier. The figure was pert and exquisite. The youthful joy of living made her very enticing. She would respond most quickly to a gay approach. So he smiled broadly and shrugged with a charming helplessness, and with his eyes squinched up, he said, “I’m sorry. I speak no Spanish. I haven’t seen you before.”

  She returned his smile and clomped over to the bureau and put two towels on top of it. She took his two dirty towels from the back of his chair and started toward the door. He moved over and blocked her way and made himself tall and smiled down at her. He pointed at his chest and said, “Paul.”

  “Ball,” she repeated, smilingly, dutifully. He pointed at her chest. “Margarita,” she said in her loud, clear, penetrating voice. He winced inwardly. Drop the rating from nine to eight.

  “You are very pretty, Margarita,” he said softly.

  She moistened heavy lips and looked at him with a smile of empty good will, of almost idiotic pleasure.

  “¿Qué quiere?” she said.

  “I do not understand,” he said, and he was so encouraged by her smile that he reached out a wary hand and clasped her waist, narrow and supple under the sleazy red rayon, warm to his touch.

  She looked quite startled for a moment, and then a broader smile of complete comprehension lit up her rather heavy face. She turned and put the towels on the chair and stepped out of her red shoes and, in front of Paul’s horrified eyes, made a series of gestures so unmistakably specific, so unbelievably crude, that Paul felt his cheeks grow hot with the first blush since childhood. Despite the range and diversity of his amatory conquests, Paul Klauss was, in his heart of hearts, a prude. During her gestures and gyrations, Margarita had not lost her broad delighted smile of inquiry.

  “Sí?” she said. “Sí? ’Stá bien, horita, Señor Ball.”

  And she reached down and grabbed the bottom of the red dress and started to yank it up off over her head. Paul lunged toward her and pawed the dress back down and said, “No! No!”

  She tilted her head onto the side and looked at him in confusion, “¿No?”

  “No.”

  “Ah! Más tarde, creo?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. But no.”

  “¿Esta noche? ¿Después de la comida? ¿A las once horas?”

  “No.”

  “¿Qué falta, Señor Ball? ¿No le gusta amor? ¿Entonces, por qué las mano aquí?” She touched her waist where his hand had rested, her dark brows knotted in bafflement. Her voice was so clear and loud he was certain it could be heard all over the hotel. By gestures he told her to leave. She left with the pile of towels and a look of hurt, red heels clumping.

  Paul shut the door and went over and sat on his bed. He felt abused and cheated. Damned little slut. Probably a half-wit. No sense of decency. Didn’t mean a damned thing more to her than if I’d asked for two extra towels. Or wanted to shake hands.

  After Margarita had delivered the rest of the towels, she wandered thoughtfully out into the back of the hotel looking for Felipe. Because he had worked for so long for Señor Drummond, Felipe, of all of them, would be the one most likely to be able to explain to her the odd behavior of the Americano.

  She found Felipe Cedro sitting on the stone step in front of the doorway of the room he had appropriated in the staff quarters behind the hotel. He was languidly shining Miles Drummond’s black dress shoes. She leaned against the side of the building patiently until he was ready to take notice of her.

  “¿Qué, tal, Margarita?”

  “Felipe, a most curious thing has happened. I took the towels to the room of Señor Ball.”

  “There is no Señor Ball. I have seen the list. What room?”

  “Number eight.”

  “Ah, that is Señor Ball Klauss. In English Ball is the same as Pablo in Spanish. What of this Señor Klauss?”

  “When I started toward the door he stepped in front of me. He told me his name. I told him mine. He looked at me in that certain way. You know that way. And he put his hand here, on the waist. So … I knew what it was he wanted. And I was not very busy. And you know I am a loving person. And he is a pretty little man with yellow hair. And I suppose I am curious. In a sense. So with motions I make certain it is what he wants and I can see from his face I am right, so I begin to take off the dress, and he stops me, and his face is red and he says no, no, no. From that moment, whatever I say, he says no, no, no, and he makes signs for me to go and I do so. I do not understand such a man, Felipe.”

  Felipe mustered his thoughts while he scratched at a daub of black polish on the side of his thumb. “It is not an easy thing to have an understanding of them, chica. Their blood is cold. I swear by all the saints that in all the years I have worked for Señor Drummond, I have not known him to be with a woman. Yet he is not one of the others.”

  “Incredible!” Margarita gasped.

  “It is the truth of God. Here is what I believe about this Señor Klauss. I believe that he is shy and timid. I believe he is frightened of you. They are like that. He made a little gesture and he believed you would be alarmed, and with them it is a game without meaning. He could not know that you are a woman of warm blood and honesty. Maybe he has never been with a woman. There are thousands of them who have never attempted it, not even as a child.”

  “Incredible. The poor frightened little man with yellow hair. What can I do to help Señor Ball?”

  “They grow more bold at night, but still not bold enough for such a one as you. Let me make a plan.” She waited patiently, squatting on her heels, as Felipe thought. He reached into his pocket and took out a key, looked warily around and handed it to her. “Hide it away. Do not tell anyone you have it. And you must give it back to me. It will open every door in the hotel.”

  “A valuable thing to have.”

  “What you must do is go to the room of this Señor Klauss and let yourself in. Hide naked in the darkness in his bed. Before you do so, unscrew the bulb a little bit so that the light will not function. Then when he comes to bed he will be unable to help himself.”

  She laughed softly. “Ah, then he will not say no, no, no. I will make him say yes, yes, yes.”

  “One more thing you must do, in return for my courtesy in loaning the key to you. Once it is finished, you must say one thing in English. Now say this after me and remember it perfectly.”

  A few minutes later Margarita was able to say, “Geef me ten dollar.”

  “Felipe, what does it mean?”

  “It means give me one hundred and twenty-five pesos.”

  Margarita sprang indignantly to her feet and glared down at him, arms akimbo. “Margarita Esponjar is not a puta, Señor Cedro. Yes, I do things which must be confessed but it is because I have the warm blood and a loving nature. But not for money. No. There are the miserable old dried-up ones that call me puta out of jealousy because at home with my mother I have the two babies without a father. But I spit on their wrinkles. I am not a puta. I will not do such a thing.”

  Felipe made her sit down and spoke to her calmly. “This is not the same class of thing, Margarita. A puta is a woman in a room behind the cantina who is available to all men, serving them for money and without love. You feel a desire for this yellow-headed man. Good. They all have hundreds of thousands of pesos. So it is a thing you will do from your loving nature. But afterwards you will say what you have learned. And you have a beautiful, clear, loud voice, Margarita. Say it softly in the beginning, and if he does not give it to you, say it more loudly until he does. Should he not pay for the fa
vor you are doing him, for warming up, for a little while, that cold blood of the North?”

  She looked dubious, but she nodded. “Perhaps you are right. And it is a lot of money, Felipe.”

  “And half of the money you will bring to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I found this job for you, and I told you this way to make money and you will make money for all of the summer, more than you have ever seen before, if you will listen to what I tell you to do. How else could such a one as you earn sixty-two pesos, fifty centavos in such a short time, with such pleasure—and pride in knowing that you are doing a good thing for Señor Klauss?”

  “It is truth,” she said, and nodded and smiled and stood up and walked toward the door to the kitchen. He squinted into the sunlight and watched the swing of sprightly hips under red rayon, watched the red shoes kick up little puffs of dust. When she was gone he began to rub a higher gloss onto the black shoes and began to hum a ranchero tune.

  Barbara Kilmer sat in the rear of the aircraft at a starboard window during the flight from New Orleans to Mexico City. She had had a two-hour wait in New Orleans after the flight down from Youngstown. A heavy Mexican businessman sat beside her on the Eastern flight to Mexico City. He breathed in an asthmatic way and spent the entire trip going over sheet after sheet of figures and tabulations, writing very small marginal notes with a very large gold pen.

  Barbara was twenty-five. There was a sadness in her face, a residue of grief. She had silver-blond hair, black unplucked brows, dark-blue eyes. In the coffee shop in New Orleans, a half hour before flight time, a man had come in and sat on the far side of the horseshoe counter, facing her. He had glanced over at her and thought her a rather pleasant-looking but quite plain girl. As he waited for his coffee to cool he found himself looking at her often. Nice bone structure of brow and cheek. Nice line of jaw. Nose tilted just enough. And when she used her hands he saw they were long and slim and very pretty. After fifteen minutes of discreet appraisal, he found himself wondering how he could have thought her plain. She was actually exceptionally lovely. He decided perhaps his first impression had been wrong because there was so little animation in her face. When he had noticed the engagement and wedding rings he had felt a curiously sharp regret, but he was still curious enough about her to time his departure so that he followed her out. She was tall, and her legs were good, and she moved with grace.

  He saw her again just entering the airplane as he started up the stair platform, and wondered if he felt sufficiently venturesome to sit beside her, but by the time he entered the plane, a heavy man had sat beside her and was opening his briefcase.

  For the first part of the flight he wondered about her, and wondered why she was going to Mexico. There was a certain aura of lifelessness about her that seemed to him to be unnatural. Perhaps the result of grief or shock. It seemed a reasonable supposition that she might be going to Mexico to acquire a divorce. A very messy divorce situation could turn out all the lights behind a beautiful woman’s eyes.

  As Barbara Kilmer looked down at the brown burned land of northern Mexico she felt the first weak tremor of anticipation. After having felt nothing for so long, it both surprised her and annoyed her. This stupid Cuernavaca Summer Workshop was her father’s idea, her father’s big surprise birthday present. She had tried her best to look pleased, but she knew from the expression on his face that she had failed. The least she could so, she thought, was attend the thing. But it could do no good. Nothing in the world could do any good. She would never respond to anything again. Thus she despised herself for feeling any inward flutter of butterfly wings, no matter how feeble. It seemed a monstrous disloyalty to Rob. To his memory.

  It had happened last summer. On the third day of July, a hot still day in central Michigan. Rob came home for a quick lunch. He was tense and preoccupied. They were paving, and the segment of big divided highway was behind schedule. Yet, before he left, he had swung her up at the doorway of the farmhouse they had rented for the duration of the road job, kissed her soundly, set her down and, grinning, whacked the seat of her shorts with the flat of his hand. She had waved at the dusty car as he headed back for the job.

  Much later she had learned how it happened that hot afternoon. A wind had come up. Rob Kilmer, the young superintendent, had been standing near the big paver, talking to an engineer and a state inspector. A paper had blown off his clipboard. Rob had lunged to get it before it blew under the paver, reaching under the guard rail to snatch it. And in that instant the operator had dropped the scoop.

  By the time they got him to the nearest hospital he was dead.

  It had been all nightmare and confusion from then on. Two of Rob’s brothers and one of his sisters had flown to Michigan to do what they could, and take the body home to Tulsa for burial. They were big people, as Rob had been. Big and brown and giving that curious impression of being a little larger than life. They were stunned and bitter with grief. It was a big close family, and Rob had been the youngest of them, and, as nearly every one of them found a chance to tell her, the best.

  They had sorted his possessions and disposed of his things, giving Barbara the intimate and personal things she would want to have, and arranging to ship her belongings back to her family’s house in Youngstown. Then there was the unreality of funeral, where she felt like an outsider. She had known him for only two years, and had been married to him for most of that time. But these people had known him for all of his life, and their grief was honest and obvious. She could feel nothing. Only a numbness and an emptiness.

  When it was over she went back to Youngstown and she moved into her old room, the room full of memories of high-school intrigues, college vacations, so that sometimes, awake in the night, she could almost believe that the marriage had never happened, that it had no more reality than some of the other dreams and visions she had had during the mystic years of adolescence.

  But in morning light it was real, and it happened to her. It had happened to Rob, and nothing in her life had prepared her for this shocking knowledge that life could be so utterly cruel, could present you with the insoluble, incurable problem of complete loneliness.

  Financially she was not too badly off. There had been compensation and accident insurance and life insurance. She had put a little over three thousand in a savings account, and, right after the first of each month the two checks arrived, one for eighty-two fifty and one for thirty-one dollars. So long as she lived with her parents it was more than enough. And there was the car, Rob’s car, that she seldom used. Once, during the third month of her grief, she had taken the car out and driven it at high speed through the clarity of an autumn morning, knowing how simple it would be to wrench the wheel and die in violence as Rob had died, but could not bring herself to make that final fatal gesture.

  She was an only child and she knew that it saddened her parents to see her so withdrawn from life. But she could not help resenting the many ways, some subtle, some all too obvious, that they used to try to draw her back into involvement in life.

  She knew that so much brooding was not good for her, but she did not want to find a job that would involve her emotions in any way. She wanted something mechanical and tiring, so she could sleep. Her father was a dentist. Much to the consternation of her parents, in spite of their gladness that she was doing something, she found a job in an electronics plant where she sat each day at a long table and stapled printed circuits to amplifier chassis. The other women, a bawdy and talkative crew, spent the first few weeks riding her, calling her Princess and Lady Barbara, doing their work with little fingers crooked. But when she did not respond, they tired of the game and left her alone.

  On her twenty-fifth birthday, early in May, she could think only of her twenty-fourth birthday, with Rob. It had come on a Sunday and they had taken a huge picnic lunch and two bottles of chilled champagne into a remote Michigan meadow and he had toasted her as “this elderly party to whom I am married” and later on they had made love in th
e tall, fragrant spring grasses, and napped there, and stayed to watch a moon come up, and driven slowly home, his arm around her.

  But this birthday was stiff and strained, the three of them around the dinner table, the cake brought proudly from the kitchen. Forced laughter at forced jokes. And the presents to unwrap. A cashmere sweater, a scarf, a small bottle of good perfume. And finally, the envelope from her father containing the round-trip airline ticket, and the letter of acceptance from a Miles Drummond, stating that he was pleased to welcome her to the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop.

  In high school Barbara had shown some small talent for drawing and painting and design. She had been the art editor of the yearbook. In college she had taken a fine arts course, and she had dreamed of being a career woman, possibly in the art department of one of the large advertising agencies, or on one of the big magazines. But Rob had changed all that. A month after they had met she knew that all she wanted in her life was to be married to him, to be totally involved with him, emotionally and physically, and bear his children and raise them and love him all the days of her life.

  She knew what her father was trying to do, and she knew it could not work, but she was deeply touched. She left the table and went to her room and wept, and then came back and said that she would go, and did not tell them that it was of no use at all. Her mother had gone into the attic and found her old paintbox and the palette and the brushes.

  And now as the plane banked she fastened her seat belt and looked ahead to the southwest and saw the high buildings of the city, and once again she felt that queasy tremor of excitement.

  When John Kemp came out of customs room he heard himself paged by a great bearded brute of a man, a powerful and unkempt type who looked as though he could have ridden to the wars with Genghis Khan.