“For what it’s worth,” Weller said quietly, “you did really turn me on. I mean it wasn’t exactly a chore …”
Maria kissed him gently on the Ups. “You think I couldn’t tell that, poor baby? Look, let’s be honest with each other. You love your wife. I love my husband. I don’t want a real relationship with you, and you don’t want a real relationship with me. What I want from you is sex, and I’m more than satisfied that you can please me. Can we make a deal?”
“Can you locate my wife Annie for me?” Weller asked.
“With ease,” Maria said.
“Will you do it?”
Maria moved her hand into his crotch, teasing his flesh. “That depends,” she said. “Are you willing to be my sex slave? At least part of the time?”
“Are you serious?”
“Indeed I am, love. I enjoyed the way you used me, but a poor old lady has to feel she’s on top sometimes too.”
“If you’ll find Annie for me, I’m yours to command,” Weller said. Within reason, he thought.
“We have a deal, my pet,” Maria said. She kissed him again, this time long and deep, twining the fingers of both her hands in the hair above his ears. Still clutching him by the hair, she rolled over onto her back, leaned up against the pillows, and pulled his face to her breasts. “Now you will do my bidding, my sweet,” she said, half laughing.
And she dragged his head slowly down the length of her body and into the soft lowlands of her inner thighs, while Weller, at first reluctantly, but then with a growing passion, licked, kissed, and nibbled at her skin.
When she clamped her legs tightly around his head and began rolling the hardness of her pelvis against the softness of his mouth, Weller found himself inflamed by the very abnegation of his position, perhaps even overcome by a certain affection for this strange and powerful woman, and her sighs and groans of pleasure were not entirely unpleasant music to his ears.
Thirteen
There were still guards at the gate to the Steinhardt mansion compound when Weller drove up in response to Maria’s summons, and they still wouldn’t let him take the Triumph inside the walls. He had to park outside in the empty parking lot and walk all the way to the front entrance to the house, where a young woman in a blue smock led him inside, through the eerily empty parlors of the ground floor, and up an interior staircase to the living quarters.
Now, in the early evening, with the ground floor and courtyard empty and in immaculate order, Weller found the house sterile and depressing, like an immense, plush prison cell, or a scaled-down version of Xanadu in Citizen Kane. He wondered how Maria could bear living alone in such a huge place, with only servants, guards, and flunkies for company. He began to think of her as quite a vulnerable person, and for some reason that thought deeply disturbed him.
Maria was waiting for him in a kind of small sitting room overlooking the courtyard, with a skylight ceiling, white wicker furniture, and a jungle of potted palms, ferns, and hanging plants. She was sitting in a big peacock chair in front of a small table, and she was wearing a white sleeveless dress. The whole effect was that of an antebellum mistress-of-the-manor in some depressing Tennessee Williams play.
Somehow Weller got the feeling that he was supposed to kiss her hand and call her “ma’am.” Instead he gave her a quick kiss on the lips and sat down across the table. A young man dressed in blue appeared with a flagon of white wine and two goblets on a silver tray, served, and departed.
“Well, love,” Maria said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve located your wife.”
Weller sipped at the cold wine. “And the bad news?” he asked.
“The bad news is that Anne Weller has been assigned to the Transformational Research Institute in New York,” Maria said. “She’s working on one of John’s mysterious and boring research projects.” She touched Weller’s hand and smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Weller said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to find out. That’s great. I’m really grateful to you.” I’m nearing the end-game now, he thought. All I have to do is get into this Institute thing and get her out. There must be other Garry Bailors I can hire if I have to.
“I thought the whole idea was that you wanted to see your wife again,” Maria said.
“Of course. ”
Maria sighed. “I don’t think you understand what I’m telling you,” she said. “The Institute is under incredible security. A flea couldn’t get in or out without a life directive directly from John. There’s no way you can get in, there’s no way she can get out, and no way you can even get a message through.” From somewhere—perhaps the way Maria was looking at him, desirously, nervously, apologetically—Weller found himself drawing upon a cold and almost bitchy cruelty. “Then what I need is a life directive from John to get me in, isn’t it, Maria?” he said, regarding her coolly.
“You think I can—?”
“Can’t you, Maria?” Weller said evenly.
“Look, I may have given you the wrong impression about John,” Maria said, almost plaintively. “Most of the time I can pretty much have my own way, but the Tranformational Research Institute… . Nobody gets in there without a reason, Johns reason.”
“Well then, we have to give him a reason, don’t we?” Weller said relentlessly.
Maria laughed. “You can be a ruthless, implacable bastard, can’t you?” she said. “But in a way, I find that rather attractive.” Weller reached under the table and put his hand under Maria’s dress, smoothing the soft flesh of her inner thigh. Maria ran her tongue slowly around the edges of her teeth.
“Let’s go into the bedroom,” she said. “Afterward, maybe we can discuss your little problem.”
“You can be pretty implacable yourself,” Weller said. But he let her lead him by the hand across the hall into the bedroom. I know where Annie is, he thought. I know where she is.
But the fact seemed only a distant anesthetized reality as Maria slowly undressed him and then flipped her dress over her head, revealing her total nakedness beneath.
Yet the things they then proceeded to do to each other, the kissings and lickings, the movements of body on body, also seemed to Weller to be taking place at some great distance from the locus of his consciousness.
He performed well, but he performed mechanically. Even as he thrust against Maria, he was thinking about Annie, about knowing where she was, about how to get to see her again. But he did not fantasize about making love to Annie while he was fucking Maria Steinhardt, nor did he feel guilty about the dichotomy between what he was thinking and what his body was doing. The only guilt he felt was over the fact that he had difficulty even forming a mental image of Annie’s face.
Time passed, Maria had several orgasms, and finally appeared satiated, and Weller’s mind returned to where it had been in the sitting room as if nothing had happened. Indeed, psychically, nothing had.
“Will you help me again?” he asked Maria as they sat side by side against the headboard.
“I told you,” she said, “I just can’t tell John to let you into the Institute. It won’t work. ”
“The only way for me to get in there is for John to want me there …?”
“That’s right, love. I can’t even get in when John doesn’t want me around.”
“Well, what goes on in this damned place?” Weller asked.
Maria shrugged. “Some psychiatrist named Bernstein talked John into setting it up at a ridiculous cost. Supposedly it’s a kind of mental Manhattan Project, at least that’s what John thinks he’s doing. On the other hand, Bernstein may actually be taking John to the cleaners. Who knows? According to John they’re experimenting with everything from new-model brainwave monitors to psychedelic drugs. Whenever I ask John what he thinks he’s spending all that money to accomplish, I get Transformationalist gibberish. I think he’s convinced that the Institute is going to be his monument to history or something.”
“And what the hell is Annie doin
g in this place?”
“I don’t know,” Maria said quietly.
“You mean there are some things John keeps even from you?”
“Yes. I mean no. I mean he’d tell me if I asked, but he’d want to know why. …” Maria seemed uncharacteristically nervous, even furtive, as if they had drifted into an area where her relationship with John B. Steinhardt was not quite what she liked to pretend it was.
“Okay,” Weller said more sympathetically. “I understand the problem. But will you do what you can to help me? If I come up with a reason for John to want me at the Institute, will you help me sell it to him as best you can?”
Maria eyed him narrowly. “You know,” she said, “I’m beginning to get the feeling that you’re some kind of agent again, that all this business about your wife is just a cover story. ”
“You can check out my dossier with the Monitors . . ”
“Oh, I already have,” Maria said quite earnestly. “Still, if an agency were trying to penetrate the Institute, they might go to considerable lengths, even your wife. …”
Weller forced a laugh. “Are you really serious?”
“Quien sabe?” Maria said more lightly. “On the other hand, the thought does add a certain spice to things. All right, whoever you are, you figure it out, and I’ll front for you. Up to a point. ”
“Marvelous,” Weller said, giving her a kiss. “My superiors will be very pleased.”
Pacing in his tiny room at the Transformation Center, Weller was unwilling to even go downstairs for dinner, though he knew that in two hours he would have to drag his ass to the kitchen to wash dishes. For days now the disjunctions in his life, the splits in his mind, were driving him up walls, and every additional input—at work, in the Center, in Maria Steinhardt’s bed—just seemed to wind the spring a little tighter.
So near and yet so far. All these months of scheming, of loneliness, of turning himself into someone he no longer knew, had come down to a single point: get inside the Transformational Research Institute. Do that, and it would all be over, the unbearable psychic tension would finally be resolved. No more balling Maria, no more playing the cold demon lover. No more mind games. No more living at the Center. No more washing dishes. No more grinding out commercials for something he hated.
But how? How can I make Steinhardt want me to come to the Institute? What can I give to Maria to get to him with? How can I sell myself—?
Weller sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. Sell myself? Or sell Steinhardt… ? Something was percolating up from the lower reaches of his mind. Eptify yourself behind the scenario, he told himself. It’s there, I can feel it, I’ve got to reach for it.
Sell Steinhardt… . Sell Steinhardt. … What was it about those two words … ? Weller’s mind ached, straining for an illusive thought that hovered just beyond his grasp, like the name of an old friend caught on the tip of his tongue, like a word in a foreign language he had studied in high school. Sell Steinhardt… .
Of course! he suddenly realized. Those two words have a double meaning! Sell myself to Steinhardt, or literally sell Steinhardt like so much com flakes.
Or both.
It finally clicked, like a crystal suddenly forming in a supersaturated solution. I’m making commercials for Transformationalism, he thought, and they stink. Not because I stink, but because the scripts and actors stink. But Steinhardt on tape… . Steinhardt could sell a Corvair to Ralph Nader. I could make such Transformationalism commercials if I had John B. Steinhardt to use in them!
And with his ego, how could he not rise to the bait? How could he not at least want to talk about it?
That’s it, that is fucking it
But not immediately through Maria, he thought. Have to be more subtle about it. Plant the idea at Changes, let Karel know that I want to do it, and then use Maria to end-run around the Monitors when they come down on it. As no doubt they will.
He got up off the bed and began pacing again. He could hardly wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow, Sara and the whole crew at Changes were going to start getting a dose of how he really felt about what they were doing, and it was going to be a double pleasure dishing it out!
At the lunch break Weller casually wandered into Sara English’s office, where Sara was sitting alone behind her desk going through some scripts. Since Maria’s party there had been a lot of frost in the air between them, and Sara didn’t deign to look up until after he had planted himself heavily in a chair beside the desk with a tired, depressed look painted deliberately across his face.
When she did look up at him, it was with a somewhat owlish expression, and when she spoke, her voice was diffident and distant. “What’s the matter with you? Having trouble on the set?”
“No worse than usual,” Weller grunted.
Now he seemed to have her full, alert, and surprised attention. “No worse than usual? What are you talking about? You’ve been consistently ahead of schedule since you started directing. There haven’t been any complaints.”
“Marvelous” Weller grunted sarcastically, leading her into it.
Sara sat up on the edge of her chair and studied Weller as if he had metamorphosed into some mythical monster. “What the hell’s gotten into you, Jack?” she said.
“Don’t you know? Can’t you see it?”
“What are you talking about?”’
“Oh, come on, Sara,” Weller said in a carefully crafted tone of tired vehemence. “You know that what we’re doing is shit.”
Sara’s eyes went wide, then narrowed. She sat stiff-backed upright in her chair and her tone of voice became defensive and clipped. “I realize we’re not all up to your technical level—”
“Oh, can it, Sara!” Weller snapped. “Technical ability has nothing to do with it. What I’m turning out is shit too. A little faster, a little slicker, but just as shitty. It’s really starting to get to me.”
“What is?” Sara said uncertainly, but also somewhat belligerently. “You still haven’t told me what you’re talking about. ”
“It’s the basic stuff,” Weller said. “The scripts, and even more basic than the scripts, the very concepts of the commercials.”
Sara’s expression became rigid and her voice became almost mechanical. “You know where the scripts come from,” she said nervously. “What’s wrong with them?”
“What’s wrong with them?” Weller said. “They’re stupid, amateurish, and counterproductive. No matter how well made they might be, they’d still just be well-made garbage.” He found himself taking gleeful sadistic satisfaction in finally venting the truth, even if it were for his own Machiavellian ends.
But Sara apparently didn’t believe her ears or didn’t want to believe them. “You know I’m going to have to report this to Karel.” she stammered.
Weller deliberately ignored her and continued his diatribe. “The actors are impossible too, and the end product is something that couldn’t sell thermal underwear to Eskimos. It’s really depressing, knowing you’re doing your best and nothing but crud is coming about because the concepts, scripts, and actors you’re stuck with guarantee a hopeless product.”
Now Sara seemed really frightened. “Please stop it,” she said shrilly. “Don’t you realize what you’re saying? Don’t you know I have to report this? Don’t you know that the scripts have the force of Monitor policy and the casting has the force of life directives?”
Weller shifted to a mode of tired resignation. “Of course, I know all that. But I tell you, I’ve reached the point where I finally don’t give a damn. I care too much about what I’m doing to just sit back and let the Monitors fuck it up.”
“Jack!”
Weller bled some wistful longing energy back into his voice. “When we have the potential to make a series of commercials that could double Transformationalism’s national membership in a year.”
“What?” Sara seemed to perk up a bit.
“I mean John himself,” Weller said. “You’ve seen him on tape—now that’s star quali
ty! Boy, could I make commercials for Transformationalism if I could use John B. Steinhardt! Why hasn’t Changes made commercials using John?”
“I don’t know… . You know that kind of policy isn’t made on our level. ”
“Well, why not? It damn well should be.” Weller paused, as if slowly coming to an impromptu decision. “In fact, I think I’m going to make the request myself. In fact, you can consider it formally made as of now. I hereby propose a series of commercials using John to be shot by me. What are you going to do about it?”
“Me?” Sara squealed. “I’m not going to do a damn thing. If you think you’re going to involve me in—”
“Well, then what do I do about it, propose it to Owen Karel?”
“Jack, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t issue a life directive to John. You can’t go over the Monitors’ heads. You can’t—”
“Why not? What’s wrong with this organization that it can’t accept some professional advice?”
“Jack, good Lord. You haven’t even passed life analysis. Do you know what they’ll—”
“Fuck it!” Weller snapped, standing up. “I’m going to go find a typewriter, write a proposal, and give it to Karel. ”
“Please—”
“All right, if it makes you so nervous, you hand the proposal to Karel. With a complete report on this conversation. That should cover you with the Monitors.”
“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” Sara said quietly. “You won’t listen to reason?”
“I’m going to do it, Sara. Through you, or over your head to Karel. Your choice. ”
Sara sighed resignedly. “All right,” she said. “You type up the proposal, and I’ll hand it to Karel. But that’s all I’m going to do. No recommendation, and I am going to report this conversation. I’m going to completely disassociate myself from this insanity.”
“You do that,” Weller snapped over his shoulder on the way out. “I’ll have it on your desk in half an hour.” The die was cast. Whether the Monitors passed the proposal along to Steinhardt or not, it was going to get there. He’d give channels two or three days, and then play his hole card—Maria, the Queen of Steinhardts.
The Mind Game Page 25