by R. M. Koster
The richer I grew selling love the less I wanted it myself, and it became something of a chore to service each of my girls one afternoon a week. I couldn’t have them grow so horny they’d start enjoying the customers, for then they’d get picky or fall in love or even run out on me. Withal I slept more and more and ceased exercising entirely and gained twelve to fifteen pounds a week, so that I celebrated my twenty-first birthday by sleeping round the clock, and when I weighed myself the next day, I couldn’t see past my gut to read the numbers and had to call Andy Smart, who lived on the same floor.
“Two oh six,” he said. “Going to wrestle heavyweight next term?”
I had to smile at this, for my waddle to the bathroom had set me panting, and what did I need wrestling for when I was clearing over a thousand a week on poker and the girls?
It got so I just couldn’t get up for Pelf’s class, and finally I went to him and asked to break our contract, refunding all pay and allowances and offering him an indemnity of five hundred dollars. He pouted and said he’d taken me for a more reliable man, adding that if I was going to walk out on him in the middle of the term I might at least have the decency to hang myself like my predecessor. Then he asked how I’d grown so flush so fast, and as I felt I owed him some explanation, I told him about my good luck in cards and love. He was fascinated by the girls, two of whom he’d visited thinking they worked freelance, and he immediately forgot all about his Spanish class and clapped me on the back.
“By George, you’ve got a head for business there’s hope for South America yet if there are enough fellows like you!” And he proposed I take him as a partner and expand.
“I see one of those big trailers—no, two of them—each with three girls inside, one parked at Princeton and another shuttling between Williams and Dartmouth. Ten girls in all with the four you’ve got here, and we’ll rotate them to give the clients fresh meat each month.”
I said if we made it that businesslike, we’d have to pay the girls, and he began to lecture me on modern business methods, saying that no one exploited workers any more since it was simpler to corrupt them.
“We’ll pay the girls a straight salary,” he proposed, “and give them retirement benefits and medical care and a profit-sharing, plan, and once we’ve developed a market, we’ll raise prices and pass the costs on to the consumer.”
It sounded logical, and he was ready to put up the cash for the trailers, so I agreed and took a week off in New York to do some recruiting, and we were open for business in Princeton and Williamstown the first week in January when the students returned from vacation.
Pelf was also intrigued by my poker success, though I didn’t tell him exactly how I worked it, and said that if there was that much money being gambled, Yale ought to have a casino. He got on the phone and in twenty minutes found a couple of seniors who were short of funds and had a large suite of rooms in Jay Gould College. We bought a roulette wheel and a dice table and opened the next week, with our seniors dressed up in tuxedos running the tables and a Jap exchange student in a white jacket serving drinks.
Now, a day or two after I returned from New York with Linda, Karen called me wondering where I’d been and why I hadn’t called, asking if I’d been sick and saying she’d been afraid I’d had an accident. I didn’t bother to invent anything; people often tell the truth out of laziness when, with a little effort, they might concoct a decent lie. I told her she was a lovely girl, but I didn’t enjoy being with her any more. This was incomprehensible to her, of course. We’d been so happy, she pointed out, only the week before. She begged me to tell her what she’d done and promised never to do it again. Or what hadn’t she done, and promised to learn how to do it. Sobs rolled along the phone lines like breakers. Foaming unpleasantly around Kiki’s ears. I hung the phone on my index finger a forearm northeast of my ear, admiring her capacity for suffering and envying her the intensity of the moment. Which never came to me any more, not even when the pot was counted in four figures or one of my stable mares was treating me to prances not practiced with the customers. The swells subsided little by little. Soft drizzle of tears which I blotted with the receiver. And with a knuckle nudged a sympathetic drop of ennui from the outlying corner of my left eye.
Next came a letter, blue paper, and bluer ink, which I didn’t fully read since her handwriting was cramped. Skipped from love to love as across a rivulet and slipped it back in its discreetly scented pale blue envelope. And held it between thumb and middle finger before my nose in hope of feeling a Proustian shudder or a Pavlovian flow of juice. And then dropped it in the swing-topped waste can at Yale Station.
Then, just before or after my birthday, another call:
“I’d like to see you,” in a dry-eyed voice.
“I’m rather busy.”
“I’m rather pregnant.”
“Are you sure?”
She was. The level-headed girl had consulted Drs. Frog and Rabbit directly she found things amiss. Slightly annoying, as I’d considered the Karen file closed and had a full business day before me, but an executive must treat problems as challenges, and I agreed to meet her in Balling, at the scene of the crime.
She didn’t recognize me at once, I was so fat. “Oh, Kiki,” she said when she was installed at my table. “I’m six weeks pregnant, and you look six months.” It’s good breeding that gives them the stiff upper-lip. Centuries of money and deep knee-bends with the White Man’s Burden up.
“You’re taking it very well.”
“I was certain I was pregnant the moment I felt you come. And I’m beginning to get over you. You never loved me, did you?”
“I never said so, Karen. Of course I liked you. I still like you.”
“Of course.” She bit her lip. The Frenchwoman brought Karen a martini and me a filthy look. “What a tepid word, ‘like.’ You’re not capable of love, are you?”
I sipped my whiskey.
“I loved you so much. What I got was the echo bouncing off you. You really aren’t capable of loving.”
“I don’t know, Karen. I suppose I’ve never tried.”
“Oh, Kiki. It’s not something you try. It’s something you do or you don’t.”
“My brother was in love once. It didn’t work out.”
“Oh, God!”
She raised her drink in both hands and drank a third of it, a wave of auburn hair splashing her left wrist. The Frenchwoman sat behind the zinc bar, cooing at a fresh pair of lovers who were drinking Pernod out of season. If the interview ended soon, and I drove at top speed, I might be in New Haven in time to play a few hands.
“Well,” she said, “I didn’t ask you all the way over here to discuss love. I mean, I’d be glad to, but you don’t seem to be interested. I wondered what you might want to do about our baby. I’ll make the decision, but I’d like to have your opinion.”
“Have it out, Karen.”
She made a little smile. “I was sure you’d say that. As a matter of fact it’s what I’d decided myself.”
“It’s the logical thing. Why mess up your life. Look, Karen.” I reached for her hand, but she drew it back. “I’m sorry about it. I should have been more careful.”
“No, Kiki. That’s the one thing you did right. That’s the one moment you loved me. At least you wanted me. You couldn’t wait.”
I nodded. I’d done her enough damage without telling her the truth.
“Well,” she said. “Since you were so good at putting it in, maybe you know something about having it out. I mean I can see you’ve been in this situation before, probably dozens of times, but it’s the first time for me, so maybe you could recommend me to your abortionist.”
“I don’t have one, Karen. But I’ll find one. I’ll let you know in a couple of days.”
“I’m sorry, Kiki. I promised myself not to get hysterical. It’s not your fault. You’re a wonderful boy, Kiki, though I wish you hadn’t gotten so fat. Perfectly wonderful, except you can’t love. It’s not your fault.”
He didn’t waver, and I liked that. One either goes straight or cuts corners. God doesn’t think a bit better of you for wavering, and neither does anyone else. Sharp simply said he would need three fifty, but that he would furnish the instruments, and Grace-New Haven, the drugs.
Linda was going to change apartments and had a nice, clean place picked out. I told her not to move her clothes in for a few days and drove Karen over that weekend. She’d had her hair done, no doubt to make as attractive as possible a corpse, but she neither sniffed nor picked her nail polish on the long, silent drive from Poughkeepsie. Some men like soft, clinging women who have to be protected, and I’ll admit their company is pleasant enough while things go well, but I prefer associating with the brave ones who can stand up to crisis. That day Karen treated me like a chauffeur, ignoring my feeble probes at conversation and then making me wait downstairs in the car. I had my purple Tinieblan passport tucked over my heart and gross rolls of hundreds in all my pockets, and while Sharp scraped the makings of my first child I planned the dash to Idlewild. But Karen reappeared in an hour or so, groggy from pentathlon but still self-possessed, and curled up in the far corner of the seat.
“Did it hurt?” I asked when we were a little ways out of the city.
“Oh, no,” she answered without opening her eyes. “No more than the first time we made love. It was easy. All so easy.”
So when I began my partnership with Pelf and was beginning to think like a top-flight gringo businessman, I recalled how easy it was and considered all the fine young women who were having their lives garbled by footloose sperm cells or unplugged by haphazard quacks with dirt under their fingernails. (Two or three classmates had already asked me, as a man who knew his way around, if I knew how they might help a roommate’s girl—always a roommate’s girl—out of a little trouble.) I invited Sharp and Pelf to steaks at Mory’s and proposed we open a clinic. Both agreed that such an institution might serve a humanitarian need as well as turn a profit, and, effectively, we rented a house on a quiet street above the Engineering School and put in an operating table and a sterilizer and a comfy bed for convalescents and a stock of supplies and began nodding thoughtfully to queries on behalf of roommates’ girls and were admitting patients by the start of Christmas vacation.
I took two weeks in Miami, stuffing my paunch with gourmet food and sunning it at a poolside cabana. It had been some time since I’d any real desire for a woman, but the cabana boy, who was about my age but hardly as successful a hustler, kept pestering me, so one afternoon when I was particularly bored I had him send something up to my room. The girl was good-looking and well-trained, but though she worked over me conscientiously for forty minutes, nothing happened. Well, what did it matter when I was partner in three successful businesses and, besides, was picking four or five winners a day at Hialeah?
It was in Miami too that I lost my gift. I had had a warning. At the Law School, just before vacation, there was a draw hand when I saw the top card was the six of hearts, so I broke a pair of aces to pull in the flush. I glanced at my hand only for form’s sake and glimpsed a red six and bet the pot and was called by one fish.
“Flush!” said I, spreading my hand, but the red six was the six of diamonds.
But that fish was so used to losing he didn’t even look; he threw his hand down and left me the pot. So what did it matter if I’d mistaken a diamond for a heart? I’d won the pot, hadn’t I?
Then that day in Miami I was playing gin beside the pool for twenty-five or fifty cents a point, and I dealt the cards and checked my hand and looked over to see what my opponent was holding, and I couldn’t see anything. Just the backs of the cards with a blonde and a beach ball and the name of the hotel in gothic script. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Nothing. I looked at the deck and couldn’t see the top card either. Just that stupid slut, when once I’d been able to read each card right to the bottom. Struck stone-blind in the midst of a triple gin game, and I’d thrown my opponent a hand or two lest he think me a cheat. I played on, hoping my gift would come back. It didn’t. It never did. Still, I had a great run of luck and won a lot of money. So what did it matter? Whatever I did came out right just because I was doing it.
Back I went to New Haven, fat and torpid, stewed in money and oozing greed at every pore, delighted with myself though I’d lost my gift and needed sixteen hours of sleep a night and puffed when I climbed one flight of stairs and couldn’t have put my pecker up for Marilyn Monroe. On the first day of class we held a board meeting, Pelf, Sharp, and I, in a conference room at the Taft Hotel. Pad and pencil at each place, iced water and glasses, sheafs of deposit slips and bundles of receipts. The casino was bringing in three hundred a week above what we paid the seniors and the Jap. The trailers were operating at capacity in Princeton and Williamstown. Nineteen young college ladies had spent abortive vacations on Hillhouse Drive, and the clinic was soundly in the black. Pelf suggested we put two more trailers into New England and send one south to the University of Virginia. Sharp said he’d like to fly out to Ann Arbor and establish a clinic for Big Ten coeds. Both proposals carried, and we adjourned after toasting ourselves in champagne.
Off to collect from Linda, thankful she was on salary now, and I found a squad car parked outside her door. Sheer coincidence of course, but I decided to come back later. In my postbox a card from the Dean, who wished to see me immediately. Back to my room to slip on a more conservative necktie, and Smart told me a Mr. Tallon from the Internal Revenue Service had been by to see me and would return at three. So instead of changing my tie I removed a stone from the fireplace and plucked out my money. Bills in all my pockets and the big ones wadded in my jockey shorts. Passport, health certificate, and down the stairs, into the arms of two large men in wide-brimmed fedoras.
“Where’s Sancudo live, Fatso?”
“Sancudo …” I mused. “Sancudo …”
“Here. He looks like this.”
Creased press photo from the New York Times. Outstanding wrestler of the 1951 Metropolitan Championships, a trim, hardmuscled bruiser who bore no resemblance to bloat-bellied, triple-chinned me.
“Ah. Sancudo. Top floor, all the way to your left.”
They tramped upward without a grunt of thanks for helpful Fatso, who suppressed an urge to foul his bill-stuffed drawers and mushed out across the icy quad. And through the side gate where a constable, blue of lips and overcoat, was guarding my Hippogriff. And past him over a snow mound to hail a cab.
“How would you like to drive me to Hartford?” because they must have the train and bus stations under surveillance. As
in the films I watched last year, before I became a businessman. Aided no doubt by finks culled from my poker victims. Or Linda’s clients. Or Sharp’s patients. “For fifty dollars.”
He eyed me through the rear-view mirror; cop eyed me from beside my car. Driver nodded and cab slithered forward across the ice and I fled north, like poor Eliza, away from the baying bloodhounds, leaving my books and my rich suits of tweed and flannel and my faithful sedan and my share of the assets of three flourishing enterprises and my partners and my associates and my employees and my customers, by cab to Hartford and by bus to Boston and by train to Montreal. Where I sat in the airport waiting room reading the New York Daily News—YALE MEN STUDY SEXOLOGY, ECONOMICS; USE BOTH—until a nonstop flight left for Panama. Where I emptied my underwear into a safe-deposit box and caught a flight for Ciudad Tinieblas. Where the terminal was decked with Abajo Alejo signs and I was seized by four guardias and handcuffed and shoved into the same van that had taken me out to the airport four months before and driven to the prison and beaten by the same guards, less inhibited now but on the other hand more arm-weary, and dragged to the same cell, now crammed with friends and relatives, and locked securely in.
27
“The thing would be,” says Phil, “to have more cameras.”
He sits on Elena’s left, Sonny on her right, Carl next to Phil, Marta next to Sonny, and Kiki here at his end, on his rollaway throne.
Steaming delights orbit the centerpiece: rice with shaved coconut, lean Tinieblan beef cut in strips and seethed in onion and tomato, curried shrimps, buttered sprouts, yucca, yam, maize, fried plantain. to be spooned onto English bone plates rimmed with gamboling blue griffins; and attacked with heavy, florentine-chased sterling; and washed down with the contents of cut crystal goblets; in a room louvered from the one o’clock glare and breezed by a sea-breath shown in from the sala.