Pushover

by Orrie Hitt

  I went into the butler’s pantry and fixed a drink. So what if the gardener didn’t want to water the lawn every day, and supposing the maid wasn’t in love with her job? What was that to me? They had pay coming every week, didn’t they? Sure. And if they didn’t like it they could leave.

  The buzz of the vacuum-cleaner annoyed me so I took the drink outside to the lawn. I sat down, fiddled with the typewriter for a couple of minutes, and then lay back in the canvas chair, closing my eyes.

  I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. My mind kept jumping like a steel spring, remembering the first time that I’d met Sandy and all that had happened since. Slowly, carefully I went back over everything again, taking it apart, putting it together. Suddenly, I sat up and finished my drink. The sweat poured out of my skin in a rush. It was true. I might as well admit it. She was buying me the way she would buy an extra pair of shoes, buying me with the same callous disregard that she bought the services of the maid and the gardener.

  Why hadn’t I seen it? I don’t know. I guess it was because I had fallen in love with her, had wanted her so damned badly. All of my years of experience in selling, in outguessing other people, had been forgotten once she’d put those soft arms of hers around me. I’d been a sucker. I’d thrown away everything I’d ever had and the only thing I could ever become was a dog on a leash.

  Jesus, I thought bitterly, I should have known it that first day. I’d been selling the service, that of publishing a book in the community, but it had been Sandy who had dictated the terms. And that auto agency thing — hell, if she loved me she wouldn’t care what I did for a living. Not that I wasn’t for it, you know. No man in his right mind would pass up a deal like that. But it was the way it had happened, dragging her lawyer into it before I even had an idea of what it was all about. As though she could buy my life the way she bought anything else.

  I got up, went into the house and fixed another drink. Big and strong. I needed it right then.

  I knew why I hadn’t seen it before. Those arms, that body of hers, her hungry mouth — Christ! Enough there to drive any man over the long drop.

  I made an extra drink and returned to the lawn. I sat down, feeling weary. I wasn’t so smart. I was a jerk. It had taken the maid and the gardener to give me the clue. But maybe that was as it should be. They were my kind. They were the people I understood.

  Years before, just for one summer, I had worked at a very wealthy private club. Until that time I had thought that all rich people were the same. I’d found out differently. I’d learned that some of them treat less fortunate people with respect and their money with disdain — while others, a very small minority, do it just the other way around. These bastards would be bastards in anybody’s book, rich or poor, but because they’ve got the cash they become rich bastards. They’re the kind who want you to keep on the move, keep working for the hell of it. Because they’re paying you. Because they’ve bought you.

  Christ!

  I put away the first drink and started on the second. That’s the way it was with Sandy and me. She’d bought me. Hadn’t I done everything that she’d wanted me to do? I’d taken less profit on the book at the start. I’d fallen into that Caddy agency trap without any struggle at all. And I’d given in to her whim about refunding the money for the ads. I hadn’t challenged her on one issue, not one. I’d followed along behind her like a dog on a leash. Or a trained seal.

  She was buying me.

  I leaned back, trying to figure out why she wanted to do that. Was it because I was passably good-looking or fairly clever between the sheets? No, it wasn’t that. It was something else, something not quite so obvious. I was relatively new in Port Jessup. No one really knew me, where I came from. I could have been a writer, or a doctor or a chemical engineer. Who could say? I was a new stick of wood and I could be whittled out to almost any size or shape that pleased her. She could make me into anything she wished and parade me before her friends secure in the knowledge that they would never know the truth. A male puppet on a half-a-million-dollar string.

  The sun came down, burning against my face, but I didn’t move to get in the shade. I just sat there, sweating and thinking. I didn’t want to believe it. But I had to. It was there, laughing at me, and I couldn’t change it.

  • • •

  She drove in around one, spinning her wheels in the driveway and throwing up dust all over the place.

  She came over to the table and sat down. She was angry. I could see it in the stern lines of her mouth, the flash of her eyes.

  “I was down at the bank,” she said.

  I didn’t know what that had to do with me so I yawned and took a sip of the ice water from the bottom of one of the glasses.

  “You may not know it but I’m a director in the bank. And I’m on the small-loans committee. We went over them this morning.”

  I nodded, still not knowing what she was getting at.

  “I told them that we were getting married,” she said.

  “Well, it’s out, anyway,” I answered. “Mary asked me about it this morning.”

  She lit a cigarette and blew out the match with the smoke.

  “You can imagine how embarrassed I was,” she said, “when — not five minutes after I’d told them about us — that loan on your car came up for approval.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I took a loan on it. For two grand.”

  She stood up.

  “But that’s ridiculous!”

  I got up, too.

  “Not if I need the money, it isn’t,” I said.

  She ground her cigarette into the grass.

  “You could have asked me for it, Danny.”

  “I saw no reason to,” I told her. “I needed the money and I borrowed it. What’s the difference if I paid cash for the car and then borrowed on it, or if I financed it? A lot of people buy cars on the cuff.”

  “There’s a difference as far as a banker is concerned.”

  “There is? Well, tell me about it.”

  I guess she hadn’t expected me to come back at her that way and she began to act nervous.

  “I don’t want to argue about it, Danny. It isn’t that important. It’s just that I was — embarrassed.”

  “I was only wondering,” I said. “I don’t know about these things. I thought one loan was the same as another.”

  She was calmer now and this time when she lit a cigarette she didn’t throw it away.

  “But it isn’t, Danny. Don’t you see? If a man buys a car and pays cash for it, as you did, and then he borrows on it — well, it gives the impression that he isn’t able to look ahead, to manage his finances the way he should. Don’t you see that?”

  I saw it all right. I was the man she was going to marry, the man she would stick on a pedestal for everybody else to gawk at. I wasn’t at liberty to do the things that other people did, act the way other people acted. I’d been bought.

  “I see,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”

  She laughed and came over to me.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Kiss and make up?”

  “You’re the one who’s all upset.”

  “Then I’ll kiss you.”

  She did and her lips were warm.

  “Anyway, I paid them off,” she said. “I told them this had happened before our engagement and that you’d given me the money for it but that I’d forgotten.”

  “Thanks,” I said. She’d done it again, made another payment.

  “But don’t do anything like that again.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t.”

  She kissed me again, briefly.

  “Now that that’s settled, let’s get dressed.”

  “For what?”

  She started toward the house.

  “We’ve got a big afternoon,” she said. “First, we have to go to the radio station and give them those commercials. Then to the newspaper and get the stories started. After that I thought we could drive out to the country and have a swim. At four there
’s a meeting of the Council of Churches on the book, and this evening we’re invited out for dinner.”

  She kept talking all the while she was walking to the house and I followed along. Like a toy on a rope.

  At the steps she stopped and swung around.

  “Why don’t you go down to the motel and change, then when you get back we can have lunch.”

  I headed for the Caddy.

  “Don’t take too long.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And shave.”

  I said I would and got into the car. She stood there waving at me as I swung out of the driveway.

  By the time I reached the motel I was whistling a happy tune. What was there to be sad about, anyway? Supposing that I was right, that she had bought me, what difference did it make? She was still mine, I had her, and if I wasn’t content with the way things were all I had to do was think about that half a million bucks and the pain would go away.

  There was a note for me to call a number in town but when it didn’t answer right away I hung up and forgot about it.

  I made it fast, shaving and getting dressed. And when I drove back to Summer Road I broke every speed law in the books.

  I was on the move.

  After a dame that I might never get to really know and a half a million bucks that didn’t need any introduction.

  Of the two, I guess, the money had a lot in its favor.

  14

  IT WAS an eventful week.

  The newspapers grabbed the story on the book and gave it first page spots. Sandy even managed to convince one of the editors that he should run an editorial on it. He did, pointing out the need for such a history of the community, praising the effort as being one of great public spirit. He even mentioned that Miss Sandy Adams, “with her customary regard for the welfare of everyone,” was picking up the printer’s tab on the venture.

  “I wish he’d left that out about me,” Sandy said.

  I could have asked her how he would have known if she hadn’t told him, but I didn’t bother. I got my answer just watching her read the editorial three times.

  The radio station bombed away with its commercials, putting them before and after the Morning Devotional period and spotting them every hour during the rest of the day and evening.

  On Monday I was the guest speaker at the Kiwanis Club and I gave them a good blast on the subject of, “Local Histories — A Public Relations Service.” On Wednesday I did the same thing at Rotary but I missed the Lions Club on Thursday because Sandy had arranged for me to be interviewed on a radio program called, “The Week In Port Jessup.”

  In addition to all this, there were meetings with about a dozen different church organizations, all of them steamed up and hungry for the dollar. Sandy had thrown fuel on this by announcing, through a planted news item, that the books would be turned over to the churches cost-free. That brought on another newspaper editorial, entitled “Our Benefactor,” and this one she read half a dozen times.

  The response to all of this publicity was an avalanche of phone calls to the newspapers and the radio station with people inquiring about where they could buy or order the book.

  “We’ll get a location downtown,” Sandy decided. “And some of the women can work there, taking orders.”

  Holy smoke, I thought.

  There was an abandoned toy shop on the corner of First and North Streets and the owner of the building gave her the use of it for nothing. I found out later that the owner had his mortgage with the bank and that he was two months behind with his payments.

  We worked out a few press releases and some radio commercials on this new gimmick and on the following day the women down there, some volunteers from a couple of churches, did pretty good.

  “A hundred copies already,” Sandy exclaimed. “At that rate, I bet we’ll sell all of them.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  If work wouldn’t move them I didn’t know what would. I’d never seen so much activity over one simple thing since that time in the army when a colonel had fallen down drunk and busted a leg. Sandy had everyone running around town as if the heat had just caught up with them. Puppets. Every one of us. And I was the biggest of all.

  As the week wore on I began to see less and less of her. She was going here, rushing there, scrambling in and out of her Plymouth with such suddenness that you’d have guessed her pants were on fire. And that was another thing about her, that car. You’d have figured her for a Caddy or a Chrysler, something big and sleek, but she didn’t have any wish for one.

  “A car’s a car,” she said one day when I suggested that she use mine for the sake of appearances. “You get where you’re going just the same in one as you do in another.”

  Well, there are people like that. Not many. But some. And Sandy was one of them.

  I went down to visit Madeline two or three times, just to check on the progress of the book. She was working day and night on it and when I got there on Friday afternoon she said that she’d sent it out to Harrison that morning.

  “I’m bushed,” she admitted.

  She’d been lying around the apartment in a pair of red pajamas, taking it easy.

  “Here’s another hundred,” I said.

  She pushed it aside.

  “Wait until after you’ve seen the book.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “I hope so.” She stretched lazily, moving around inside of the pajamas. “I put a foreword in it.”

  “Good.”

  “A sort of thank-you thing for the contribution Miss Adams made toward the book.”

  “That’s using your head,” I said.

  She smiled at me.

  “You have to please your future wife, Danny.”

  “For a long time.”

  And it would be for a long time, I thought. Or awfully short. Hell, at the pace I’d been going I’d be dead before I was forty.

  “You didn’t say anything about the cover, so I didn’t do anything on that.”

  I asked her if I could use her phone and she said I could. I put in a call to Harrison, got him on the wire finally, and told him to have his artist do a pen-and-ink drawing of a boy entering a country school. I couldn’t think of anything else and this seemed like something that would catch the eye. You know, youth and knowledge and that sort of junk. Harrison agreed and then we decided on using a gray stock for the cover with the drawing done in blue ink against that.

  “Good choice,” he said.

  I told him I’d send out a check for a thousand and that the balance would be paid on delivery.

  “We aren’t very busy,” he told me. “We ought to get it out for you by Wednesday.”

  I told him that was fine, just fine and we’d use Thursday as the publication date. That’s one advantage of doing something like that by photo offset. No plates to wait for on the pictures, no long job of setting type for the copy. Just camera work and reductions and you’re in business.

  “Those pictures,” I said to Madeline after I’d hung up. “I hope you captioned them.”

  “Of course.”

  I laughed. Everything was set.

  “You’re my girl,” I said.

  But I was sorry as soon as I’d said it. I could see it in her face, the expression of her eyes, how it hurt. She wasn’t my girl any more. She had been once but now all that was finished.

  “When are you getting married, Danny?”

  “End of the month.”

  “She’s very rich.”

  “Yes.”

  “She likes to hear her name over the radio, doesn’t she? They use it enough.”

  I shrugged.

  “I hope you’ll be happy, Danny,” she said, getting up. “You will be if she loves you.”

  We had a drink together. She seemed to be lonely and I didn’t have any place in particular to go. Sandy and I weren’t due out for dinner until after seven and she was out visiting with the Catholic priests that afternoon.

  “So you’re stay
ing here in town,” I said to her after a while.

  She seemed surprised.

  “Why, no,” she said. “I’m going on.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Back to Amsterdam.”

  “No. I’ve changed my mind. Carbondale.”

  “That’s in Pennsylvania.”

  She nodded.

  “Al has a book for us to do out there. He called me about it last night and I’m going to help him.”

  Good old Al, I thought. He couldn’t let it alone and he had to be near his family. Working in Carbondale, he could have both.

  “You two will do all right,” I said.

  She turned and walked to the window. She kept her back to me. Her shoulders rose and fell once or twice.

  “We’re going to miss you,” she said. “It won’t be the same.”

  I poured another drink, thinking about it. I’d miss it, too. I’d miss the thrill of going into a new town, of meeting new people. I’d miss the frustration of trying to make nothing into money, day in and day out; the quiet nights in some little bar, the nights when we’d get together, just the three of us, and pull the city fathers apart. Yes, I’d miss it all right. And sometimes, like now, I might think about it with a sense of longing, with a feeling of loss impossible to explain. But when I did, whenever it happened, I could get out my wallet and count half a million bucks. Or half of a half a million. And that would stop it. That would cure anything.

  “What about your divorce?” I wanted to know.

  She came away from the window, walking slowly, her eyes filled with hurt.

  “Johnny’s getting one,” she said.

  “Not if you don’t want him to,” I told her.

  She spilled some whiskey into the bottom of her glass. Her hand shook. She lifted the glass, holding it, but she didn’t drink.

  “It’s better that way,” Madeline said. “There’s nothing for us.”

  I remembered the nights we had been together, the times she had clung to me, wanting something we couldn’t have. I recalled the lies I had told her, the way I had misled her, and I could have gotten to feeling badly about it all if I hadn’t mentally looked into my wallet and started counting.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve got to run.”