Please Write for Details

by John D. MacDonald

  “Not much older. Thirty-three or four, I’d guess. I’m thirty-one.”

  “What’s he doing down here, anyway?”

  “He hasn’t said.”

  “What are you doing down here, Park?”

  “I told you last night. I’m on a leave of absence from my job.” He tried to change the subject. “So you didn’t have a good time with John?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I? It’s just hard to … get close to him. I mean he says funny things and all that, but all the time he seemed to be watching us. Like he was taking notes. Oh, here comes the tequila kid.”

  Bitsy came across the patio toward them, scowling in the sunlight. She wore an aqua sunsuit, and her coppery hair came alive in the sun.

  “Hi, kids,” she said and sat beside Mary Jane. She looked at Park. “Did you or did you not get us lost on the way back here, darling?”

  “Guilty. Finally John asked that soldier.”

  “And he wanted to come along with us. Brother, if every night is like last night, I’m not going to last. I wonder how much they love us round here for coming in hooting and stamping at three in the morning?”

  Park looked fondly at her. “Bitsy, you look horrible. Maybe you remember that I bought a bottle of José Cuervo’s best when we left that joint.”

  She came to attention and ran a tongue tip across her lips. “It couldn’t make me feel worse, could it?”

  “Come on,” he said.

  When they had all assembled for lunch, Miles Drummond made an announcement. “I suppose that everyone is … uh … delighted that we have finally gotten under way. Miss Keeley’s class was … ah … particularly … rewarding this morning and she has asked me to express her disappointment that … uh … several of you did not attend. But I am certain that … on Monday morning she will see all of your … ah … bright and shining faces. This afternoon at two-thirty in the patio, Mr. Torrigan will give a lecture and do a demonstration painting and I am sure that … uh … none of us will want to miss it. We have a guest with us today, and I sincerely hope that she will be … uh … with us often. She should be with us because the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop is … her brain child. May I introduce, for those of you who have not met her, Mrs. Gloria … ah … Garvey, sitting there between Mr. Kemp and Miss Mary Jane Elmore.”

  Miles Drummond sat down and picked up his soup spoon, beaming nervously, bobbing his head.

  Mary Jane had been curious about the Junoesque and unkempt blond stranger. She had seen the unmistakable directness with which Gloria Garvey had moved in to sit beside John Kemp, and she sensed in Gloria the flavor and arrogance of money.

  Gloria turned to her and frowned and said, “Did he say Elmore?”

  “That’s right. Mary Jane Elmore.”

  “Fort Worth?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I’ll be damned! Rix Elmore’s kid, you must be. Look a little like him around the eyes. Key-rist, you make me feel like an antique. You know, the last time I saw Rix and Caroline was one hell of a long time ago. My second husband, Mike Van Hoestling, was in the ranch racket.”

  “I’ve heard Daddy mention him.”

  “Oh, Lordy, I remember one time we all got loaded in Houston and Rix phoned the ranch and had his pilot bring the old DC-3 down and take us all to Palm Springs. There must have been seven couples along. Rix had just won some kind of a tax thing, something about oil wells. Good old Caroline. After the sixth drink she’d always start to take off her clothes. How is she?”

  “Not very well, Mrs. Garvey. She and Daddy are divorced and Daddy is married again. She spends a lot of time in … institutions.”

  Gloria pursed her lips and nodded. “She never could handle it. She could get pretty messy. Rix used to get disgusted with her. Well, kid, I’ll see you around.”

  And Mary Jane suddenly found herself looking at the back of Gloria’s large, strong and shapely right shoulder, and heard her say, in a voice pitched a full octave lower, “Hello, John Kemp.” She had turned around toward him with, Mary Jane thought, the same forthright manner with which a woodsman’ might spit on his palms, pick up the ax and square off in front of the big tree. By leaning forward a little way, not conspicuously, Mary Jane could see John Kemp’s expression. She could not see the expression on Gloria’s face. But she could guess at it from the way John reacted. His throat worked as he swallowed, and he responded with a small, sickly and apprehensive smile. It reminded Mary Jane of the time out at the ranch when the big white goose had decided that Bugsy, the brown dachshund, was its friend for life, and had taken to following him wherever he went. For weeks, until the goose had backed under the front wheel of one of the jeeps while intently admiring Bugsy, the dog had gone about wearing the same look of apprehension, apology and half-concealed alarm.

  Park Barnum said, his mouth close to Mary Jane’s right ear, “And he was such a nice guy.”

  Mary Jane suddenly felt quite irritated and annoyed. She turned toward Park and hissed, “You men are so dang stupid. She’s so obvious. And messy.”

  “But real eager.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Barbara Kilmer sat quietly at John Kemp’s left, eating her tasteless lunch and trying not to listen to the conversation between John Kemp and Gloria Garvey. She felt grimly amused at the predicament in which she found herself. She knew her parents would be appalled were they to learn the living conditions to which they had so innocently and fondly subjected her. But she knew she could not be truthful in letters to them. Her father had paid the money. It was most unlikely that anyone could get any part of it back. Better to write them and make it sound like what she imagined they believed it to be.

  Such a very strange group. And I, she thought, am as odd as the oddest. I want to keep myself to myself. I don’t want to be drawn back into life by these people. I should have known from the ad Daddy showed me that it might be a curious collection of students. The old widows are sweet. Mr. Drummond is sort of nice and helpless. Every time I look at those newlyweds I feel all lost and unused. That Killdeering woman is a real grotesque. Mr. Klauss is a strange one. I don’t understand him at all. He seems shy and lonely … too. And quite nice-looking. The colonel is very fierce. The girls from Texas are certainly not down here to study painting. I’ve never liked the Park Barnum sort of man. All poised and glossy and full of sharp little remarks. And right now, I know just what I am doing. I’m trying not to hear a word that Garvey female is saying to Mr. John Kemp. He seems nice. And the sketches he did were truly handsome. I have to train my hand and my eye all over again. I was clumsy. Please, John Kemp, don’t let her move in on you. I shouldn’t care. I really don’t care. But just don’t be gullible. She’s a harpy … It’s none of my business. Why shouldn’t you have your fun and games, Mr. Kemp? The fact that there is something about you that reminds me just a little bit of Rob should have nothing to do with it. Do as you please. Everyone in the wide world can do just as he or she pleases. Just so long as I am left alone.

  Paul Klauss sat across the table from Barbara, and as he ate he studied her subdued and delicate and lovely face, the slender line of her throat, the structure of her shoulders. As he ate he tenderly, deftly undressed her. This mental game is, with most men, a rather inexact procedure. They visualize the unveiling of an idealized version of the female form or, out of the fuzziness of an untrained memory, endow the dream object with a figure once seen, perhaps on a calendar. But with Paul Klauss it was a precision operation. He had seen Barbara Kilmer walk. He had accurately estimated her measurements. He had selected her as his first venture of the Workshop summer. Out of his past experience he had learned the more intimate physical characteristics to be expected of the fair, Nordic, slim-boned, long-legged, short-waisted female in the middle twenties. So, given that knowledge, and a look at the clothed dimensions, and the other small clues, such as the skin texture of her throat and the curl and shape of her mouth, the shape and size of her hands, he could reconstruct the nude figure with such a
marvelous accuracy of detail that he might err only in the size and placement of an appendectomy scar.

  This was, of course, no more remarkable than the skill of the white hunter who, given a few pad marks in the moist earth, can tell not only the variety of the beast, but the size, weight, sex, whether it has recently fed, how fast it was moving, and how long since it has crossed the game trail. It is a compound of experience, intuition and natural talent.

  Klauss could achieve an almost equivalent degree of accuracy in estimating which approach would be most likely to succeed, and, after success had been obtained, just how the victim would react during ultimate conquest. But this was not of the same high degree of accuracy as the construction of physical detail, because it had been conditioned by invisible factors, such as a mother’s tale of marital horror, of a husband’s impatience, or too impressionable a reading of the works of Henry Miller.

  Just as, by candle light, he had removed the final wisp of dainty garment, Margarita Esponjar reached around him and refilled his coffee cup. When it was full, Margarita reached stealthily down and caught a small fold of flesh of the back of Paul Klauss, just above his beltline and just over his right kidney, between a strong brown thumb and a strong brown finger. She gave him a love tweak, a little pinch. But not only were her fingers, as a result of many years of the slapping and kneading of tortillas and other forms of manual labor, as effective as a pair of needle-nose pliers, she had also selected an unusually sensitive area for the caress.

  Klauss’s vision of the fair Barbara by candle light was gone in one small portion of a microsecond. His mouth opened in a soundless cry of anguish. When it was at its widest, Margarita whispered into his ear, “Esta noche, querido.” She paddled away in her big red shoes, grinning back over her shoulder and swaying her hips a good three inches farther to each side than usual.

  Hildabeth McCaffrey, on Paul’s left, stared after the girl, then whooped and banged Paul solidly under the heart with her elbow and said, in a carrying voice, “I believe you’ve made a conquest, Mr. Klauss. I believe you have.”

  Paul looked around the table. Everybody was looking at him, most of them with amusement. He felt his face get hot. He wanted badly to explain, but there was nothing to say. His back where she had pinched it felt as if a red-hot wood rasp had been imbedded in it. He bent his head over his plate, a temporarily beaten man.

  Chapter Eight

  Gambel Torrigan stood beside the easel he had erected in the open patio and counted the house. On the second count he knew who was missing. Agnes Partridge Keeley, of course. And Park Barnum and the two girls from Texas. After lunch Barnum and the two girls had been yawning vastly and giving off telltale fumes of tequila.

  He checked over his materials, faced the group, hooked his thumbs in his belt and glared at them. It was an act he had done many times. Torrigan’s Demonstration.

  “Try to paint the secret corridors of the heart,” he bawled so loudly they all jumped, even Gloria who had heard it before. “Paint the climate of joy, or the articulation of the stars. Paint of the way something feels in the hand. An apple, a knife or a breast. Pain the smell of sickness, or the cold pride of a bird song, or the dead spell of winter, getting the stink of rotten snow into it. But for the sake of God, don’t paint a barn or a tree or a horse.”

  He tilted the big piece of white board flat, yanked the top off a bottle and poured a puddle of dark blue oil ink onto the white surface. He picked up the board and tilted it this way and that so that the ink ran back and forth, making its own patterns.

  “Where do you start? Start with color. Color is your language. Color is a form of light. The juxtaposition of color and form. Don’t whine to me about communication. Communication is for newspapers. If you have to communicate, try to get in touch with yourself.” He upended the board on the easel, snatched up a great hairy brush and edited the random droolings of the ink.

  “Where do you start? Start with an accidental. What the hell does this blue mean? What does blue mean to you? What little creak do you hear in your soul when you look at blue, blue, blue?”

  “My goodness!” Dotsy Winkler murmured.

  And he began to press fat blobs of opaque water colors out of their tubes, applying them directly to the painting, mixing his colors directly onto the surface as he worked, ranting at them, saying madnesses that, during the moment they were said, seemed to have meaning.

  Miles Drummond was watching with his mouth half open. He looked up when there was a tap on his shoulder. Felipe Cedro was looking down at him with a certain amount of satisfaction. He said, “Señor, the men of the government are here.”

  “What?” Miles whispered. “What men?”

  “To see you, señor.”

  As he headed for the lobby, Miles could hear the stentorian roars of Gambel Torrigan diminishing behind him. There were four men in Miles Drummond’s office. They all carried shabby briefcases and wore shiny, dark-blue suits, frayed collars and neckties dingy at the knot. They were all uniformly short. Two of them were very round and sweaty and two of them were very lean and dusty looking. They introduced themselves. One of the round ones, a Mr. Lopez, performed the introductions in curious English. Felipe had brought two more chairs and they all sat down. Briefcases were opened and files taken out.

  “Now, sir,” Señor Lopez said, “it is to be seen that you are in operation of a hotel, sir. With not getting licenses.” He ticked them off on short thick fingers. “License for handling foods. License for selling the bed. Special license for commercial bus operationing. License for employment of staff hotel workers. Special license to lease and operating hotel.” Mr. Lopez paused and smiled broadly and lovingly at Miles. “Is very serious no licensing, sir. Very very serious. Big fine, big penalty, much trouble, sir.”

  Miles swallowed hard and smiled back and said, “There is some mistake. I am not operating a hotel. I am operating a school.” He switched to Spanish. “It is a school here. It is a school of painting. It is not a hotel.”

  Lopez beamed even more widely. “Ah, sir. A school, sir. Then you do have the licensing for a school? Federal and also State of Morelos, sir.”

  “I did not know it was necessary, gentlemen.”

  Lopez kept smiling. “It is a school with students living here, sir, no?”

  “Yes. That’s right. They live here.”

  “Ah, sir. Then it is necessary the two big licenses for the school. And also the others, all the others as if it is a hotel operating also.”

  Miles stared at him and said dully, “What?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. big fines. Big penalties. You are citizen of Mexico, of course?”

  “I am a rentista only,” Miles said hopelessly.

  They all smiled at him and Lopez said, “Ah, sir. Now it is of much more difficult. Maybe impossible.”

  “What will happen if it is impossible?”

  “Just to close up everything only. Then fines and penalties, sir.”

  At that moment Gloria Garvey appeared in the doorway. She glared at the four visitors and said, “Just what the hell is going on here, Drummy?”

  He flapped a hand at the four men. “These people are going to close me up. Nobody thought of the licenses.”

  Gloria stared harshly at Lopez until his smile faded away. “Drummy,” she said, “you scamper out of here and leave this to me. And close the damn door on your way out.”

  Just as he closed the door he heard the beginning of a torrent of Gloria’s rough and ready Spanish. Miles paced up and down outside his office, hearing Gloria’s voice frequently climb to shrillness, hearing the excited babbling of the men. Gradually the noise quieted down. The door opened. The four men filed out. They each shook Miles’s hand, all of them smiling. They went out and climbed into an old Packard sedan and were driven away by a man in uniform.

  “Come right back into your office, Drummy, and make out a check to Gloria Garvey for two thousand and forty pesos. Right away, dear. It so happened I had a big chunk of cash
in my purse today. That made it a little cheaper, I think.”

  “What is this for? Are they going to close me up?”

  “Of course not, dearie. The forty pesos is for a special, provisional, limited license that covers all the other licenses until the end of August.” She clicked her big white teeth at him meaningfully. “And the two thousand is the bite, Drummy. The mordida. A little gift to hasten the arrival of the special license.”

  “Oh.” He made out the check and gave it to her. She waved it dry and popped it into her purse.

  “What would you do without me, dear?”

  “Thank you, Gloria. Thanks so much.”

  “Lopez will bring the special license around in a week or so. And when he comes, you can be damn sure he’ll try to gouge some more out of you. If you give him nothing, you’ll hurt his pride and he may make trouble. If you give him too much, he’ll be back again. Drummy, do you think you’re capable of holding off just as long as you possibly can, and then give him a hundred pesos?”

  “I … I think so, Gloria.”

  “Tell him you’re losing money. Tell him the school was a bad idea. Be very reluctant. Then you won’t see him again, I hope.”

  “All right, Gloria.”

  “And for God’s sake, stop looking like a rabbit with an ulcer. Everything is just fine, Drummy. The food stinks and this is a very creepy building, but most of your people are delighted. They’re having a Big Adventure. Gam is currently confusing the hell out of them, but they’ll learn to love it.”

  Gambel Torrigan finished his lecture and demonstration painting at four-fifteen on that Saturday afternoon, the first day of July and the first day of the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop. Those of the students who had been thoroughly cowed by the experience came meekly up to get a closer look at the vivid, dramatic and confusing painting he had done. Hildabeth McCaffrey and Dotsy Winkler were convinced they would feel far happier with the more gentle devices of Agnes Partridge Keeley. Monica Killdeering and Harvey Ardos felt tremendously stimulated. They felt as if some dangerous and exciting new vista had been opened up to them. They didn’t know just what it was, or what to do about it. But it certainly seemed exciting. For Gil and Jeanie Wahl, sitting side by side, thighs and shoulders touching, hands tightly locked, while the demonstration had taken place, it had been a most curious interlude. They had sat there in such a humid and hypnoid awareness of each other that it was as if they had been alone in a sunlit patio. Torrigan had been a minor annoyance, a noisy, gesticulating puppet seen infrequently through the wrong end of a telescope. They had sat in their awareness of each other, breathing shallowly. When it ended they stirred and looked around in gentle confusion, as people awakened from half sleep. They stood up and, with unspoken accord, hands still clasped, began to walk quite slowly back toward their room. The expression on Jeanie’s round young health-poster face was almost stuporous, eyes heavy, mouth slack, throat too frail for the head’s heaviness. And she wavered slightly from side to side as she walked. Colonel Thomas C. Hildebrandt, U. S. A., Ret., had sat through Torrigan’s performance out of a soldier’s sense of duty. He had sat there like a chained water bird being proffered spoiled frogs. When it had ended he had added a single grace note to the patter of applause, a parade-ground snort of such dimension and resonance that Barbara Kilmer, seated beside him, had jumped and turned and looked at him in a startled way. “No terrain,” the colonel said, by way of apology. Paul Klauss, without seeming to do so, watched the lithe flex of Barbara’s waist as she turned toward the colonel. He felt relieved to learn, from Torrigan’s lecture, that he could perform quite adequately in Torrigan’s group. It was not necessary apparently to draw anything. One attempt to sketch a fountain had been enough. John Kemp went up and looked critically at what Torrigan had done during the demonstration. He wanted to be quite fair. He sensed that much of what Torrigan had said had been not only shocking, but quite meaningless. The man did have some interesting color values and a reasonably balanced composition when he was through. John Kemp had no patience with that kind of intellectual insularity which says, “If I can’t understand it, it’s no good.” He knew that nonrepresentational and abstract art had provided a creative and satisfying outlet for many painters who had become impatient with the restrictions of representational art. In his own work, though the source was always apparent, the treatment was abstract. He knew that public understanding of abstract art was seriously handicapped by the pretentious asininity of most art criticism. Yet something about Torrigan’s work bothered him. There was a strange shallowness about it, a flatness. And suddenly he made what he felt was an apt guess. Perhaps the man couldn’t draw. Perhaps he had never served the very necessary apprenticeship in pure draftsmanship that must precede any venture into nonrepresentational work if it is to have any validity, if it is ever to be much more than the smear and scrawl of a child obsessed by color.