All These Condemned Read online

  We went back out on the terrace. She frowned. “Randy, it’s just a tiny bit too loud out here. Be a dear and run in and turn it down just a shade more.”

  Randy went buckety-buckety into the living room. Noel looked down into her glass.

  Judy appeared on the terrace at the head of the steps. “The sun is gone, people,” she said. “Judith turns blue. Feed the girl rum. Hey there, Paul, Mavis. How do you like the gilded wilderness?”

  I like Judy. She got her start singing with a band. She didn’t have much voice, but what she had she threw around with abandon. When her face is in repose, which is not often, you realize with surprise that she is quite a pretty blonde. And when she stands still, which is equally seldom, you see that her figure is trim and good. But when she is in motion, with that rubbery mercurial face, with all her calculated awkwardness and grotesqueries of stance and movement, you see merely that clown, that Judy Jonah, that crazy gal.

  But I feel sad, watching her, because I know television has devoured her, and I know she knows it. The last forty weeks of Judy, the half-hour show that we sponsored until she went off in June for the summer, slipped in the ratings, week by week. There is a limit to the amount of straight comedy the public will take from one person. Situation comedy has a longer life. Judy’s was straight. And almost inevitably, she duplicated routines. I knew that Wallace Dorn, the account executive at Fern and Howey who has the Ferris account tucked neatly under his wing, had been scouting around for a new fall show, new talent for Ferris. So I wondered what Judy was doing up here without her agent. I suspected that Wilma had clubbed her into it. It would be so easy to trade on Judy’s uncertainty. “Don’t bring that horrible man, darling. We won’t talk business, believe me.”

  The music masked the sound of the last car coming in. We didn’t know Wallace Dorn had arrived until he walked around the edge of the terrace. He wore his country tweeds and an ascot. He is an ersatz Englishman. There seems to be a constant supply of them in New York. The military mustache, the carefully gobbled enunciation with the ends of sentences falling off into “d’y’ know.” Much talk of the club, no ice in mine, please, and, on occasion, a silly little stick to carry. Veddy, veddy country, old Wallace Dorn. Bachelor, sportsman, school-tie type.

  It was another hour before we were all collected on the terrace, Judy and Gilman Hayes back in clothes, José in a far corner standing behind a little bar on wheels, standing with the remote patience of a horse, and a little Mexican gal, cute as a button, hefty across the hips and shoulders, who appeared among us from time to time to pass little items of melted cheese.

  As the alcohol worked on them I could begin to smell more and more of the tension. I didn’t know what was up, but Wilma seemed both too gay and too smug, and everyone else too miserable.

  I finally had a chance before dinner to cut Steve Winsan out of the herd. I got him aside and said, “What goes, Steve? What the hell is up? Why all the sniping going on in all directions?”

  He shook his head sadly. “Lucky boy,” he said. “A nice safe clean job. Lucky boy.”

  “What is up? Is it a state secret?”

  “I’m just sore enough to tell you, Pappy. I lose one client, I figure on picking up another. Our Wilma lives big. Old Randy, the watchdog, has been nibbling on her very gingerly about personal expenses. There’s a tax matter pending. She put too many cookies in this layout. She’s living too high. She’s a client on a personal basis, you know. Not through the company. Randy thinks I should be cut off at the pockets. And he wants her to drop Muscle Boy as an expensive luxury, which means cutting me off there, because she has been paying the PR shot on Muscle Boy, the shot that made him a big wheel in the gallery world. I handle Judy, too. She’s got Judy up here to put the blocks to her. She promised Judy next year’s show but didn’t put it in writing, and at the same time told Jolly Boy Dorn to dig up something else for fall. He hasn’t found anything and Randy whispers to me that she’s lifting the account and putting it in another agency. Which Dorn damn well suspects. And don’t think he won’t put up a battle. Don’t think I’m not going to do battle too, my friend. I need a good lever. With same I will pry hell out of Randy and get him to tell Wilma dahling that she better keep me on. My God, if I lose all three, it’s better than six hundred a week that Stephan Winsan Associates stop getting. If I wasn’t half tight I wouldn’t be telling you all this, Pappy. You sure she’s not about to cut your throat too?”

  “You make me wonder.”

  “There’s one more wheel within a wheel too, Pappy. She tells our Randy that, as her tame and captive business manager, he should not have permitted her current expenses to get into such a state. The poor jerk. He begs and pleads and she ignores him, then she turns around and blames him because she didn’t listen to him. She’s got him so jumpy if you went up behind him and snapped your fingers he’d jump out of his shoes. This is going to be a gay, gay week end. Keep your guard up.”

  I tried to follow his advice. Steve’s briefing clarified the tension. I could watch the focal points. Judy was overly casual. Wallace Dorn became more British than Churchill. Randy Hess had the severe shakes. Noel acted as though she wished she were somewhere else. Steve was quarrelsome. As my Mavis got drunker, her imitation of Wilma began to border on parody. And you could almost hear Wilma purr. I half expected her to sit on the floor and start cleaning her shoulder with her tongue. We ate abundantly of the highly spiced Mexican food prepared by the doom-faced Rosalita, served by José, her brother, and Amparo, the cutie. It was semibuffet, with each of us filling our plates the first time and with Amparo trotting about with the hot casseroles providing refills. I saw Gilman Hayes sitting on the floor in a shadowy corner and saw the exceedingly primitive caress he conferred on Amparo when she leaned close to serve him. Her only reaction was a bit of excess hip sway when she moved away from him. The stolid mestiza face did not change expression. Later I saw José watching Gilman Hayes with an equal lack of expression. I did not think I would care to be looked at in precisely that way.

  After dinner there was the softness of the good music in the big lounge, and all the world outside brilliantly floodlighted. Steve and Wilma played their normal vitriolic game of gin. Judy Jonah, Wallace Dorn, and I played a three-way game of Scrabble at a nickel a point. Noel Hess, pleading a headache, had gone to bed. Randy jittered around, taking care of the music, fussing with the floodlighting, rearranging ash trays, fixing drinks, kibitzing at both games. Randy kept South American music on the turntable at Gilman Hayes’s request. The light was bright on the Scrabble board, a spotlight with an opaque shade.

  My concentration was bad because I could not help being aware of Mavis dancing with Hayes. I had no cause for complaint, no legitimate cause. But the music was low, slow, and insinuating, and they did entirely too much dancing without moving from one spot. I felt alternately sweaty and cold. I could not turn and look at them. I would see them from the corners of my eyes. Fragments. A slow turn, his hand brown on the softness of her waist. An infrequent image of them in the glass. The music was full of rhythmic tickings and clackings and thumps, with a horn crying. Wilma was saying, in the other corner, “One card at a time, damnit, Winsan,” and Wallace Dorn gave a little grunt of satisfaction, then clacked the wooden tiles onto the board.

  I suddenly realized that Hayes and my wife were gone. I turned quickly and looked at the empty room. I must have started to rise. But Judy, with a quick shielded movement, pressed my arm. I looked at her. Wallace Dorn was studying his rack, chewing a fragment of his mustache. Judy made a slight motion with her head. I looked in that direction, through the glass, and saw that they were dancing on the big terrace now, in the light of the floods. They had a theatrical look, as though they were on one of those monstrous sets that the Hollywood geniuses create for Astaire. At any moment a silver staircase would unwind from the stars, and down it would come the sharp-shouldered chorus boys and a quarter ton of bare thighs.

  I looked at Judy with gratitude, an
d with respect that she had sensed so quickly what was going on and how I could have made a fool of myself. Her face changed into the public Judy, and she gave me a distorted wink so vast I could almost hear it. Wallace Dorn gave his warning grunt and changed “own” to “clown” in such a way that the “c” changed “lean” into “clean,” and the “c” was on a bonus square.

  After the game we both owed Wallace. We paid him. Judy yawned and said, “Not another. I know when I’ve been stomped, pardner. I am going to go stare at a star and then crumple into bed.”

  “Need help looking at a star?” I asked her.

  “You take half the light years and I’ll take the other half.”

  We went by the dancers. They seemed unaware of us. We went down the stone stairway and out to the end of the left wing of the dock. Judy kept her hands shoved deeply into the big patch pockets of her wool skirt and scuffed her heels, shoulders a bit hunched against the night chill. There were almost too many stars. The red mat she had been sunning herself on was wet with dew. I flipped it over to the dry side and moved it near the edge. We sat down, dangling our legs toward the water. I lit her cigarette and turned and looked up over my shoulder toward the high terrace. The music was faint. Sometimes I could see them as far down as the waist when they moved near the edge of the terrace. Other times they were back out of sight.

  “Pretty fancy tumbril to ride in,” Judy said.

  It took me a moment to follow her. “How sharp is the knife?”

  “Sharp enough. People have heard it being sharpened. So I got canceled out of a couple of guest spots on summer shows. And the gang is beginning to break up. Can’t blame them. They need a warm spot come fall.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just so damn tired, Paul. I can always grow a new head. I’ve done it before. I’m a rough girl, Paul. I’m a fighter. So I keep telling myself. I could get a Vegas deal. But I’m just pooped. I don’t know. I’ve made it and I’ve kept more than most and it’s stashed where I can’t touch it, thank God. I’m supposed to react, I guess. Maybe she wants a down-on-the-knees response. I can always act, if it’ll keep her happy. Me for bed.” She got up. I stood up beside her. She put her fists up and began to wobble around the end of the dock, rubber-legged, lurching, snarling, “Yah, you never touched me, ya bum.”

  I was suddenly aware of the very special quality of her courage. I took her by the arms, holding her arms tightly just above the elbows. I shook her a little. I said, “I like you, Judy. I like you a hell of a lot.”

  “Leggo, or I’m going to cry right in your face.”

  I stood out there and watched her walk back to the shore, up the steps, out of sight across the terrace. I finished another cigarette and then went up. It was after one. Steve and Wallace Dorn had disappeared. Wilma and Gilman Hayes sat on a low couch. They stopped talking when I came in. Hayes sat with his big arms folded, looking at the ceiling. He looked sullen and stubborn.

  “Mavis went to bed,” Wilma said. We said good night. Hayes gave me a vague nod.

  Mavis, just a shade unsteady on her feet, was getting ready for bed, humming one of the Latin numbers. She gave me a warm moist smile. We went to bed. She was very ready, with swollen and eager readiness that completely ignored our increasing coolness toward each other. There was nothing flattering about it. Gilman Hayes had readied her, and the alcohol had primed her, and the music had quickened her. I was merely a convenience. A perfectly legal and uncomplicated and available convenience. There were no words of love. It was all very sudden and very tumultuous and very meaningless.

  Afterward I heard her breathing deepen and change into the breathing of sleep. The music was gone and the floodlights were out. There was a sound of water against the twin piers. She had managed to kill something. I did not know precisely how it was done. But I lay there and looked at the light patterns I could make when I squeezed my eyes shut, and I searched through my heart and could find no love for her. I was certain there had been love. But it wasn’t supposed to go away, like throwing away the pumpkins after Halloween. I looked for fondness, and found none. I looked for respect, and found none.

  She slept beside me, and she was just a big, moist, nubile, healthy, sycophantic young woman, too damn selfish to start bearing the children I wanted, big in the vanity department, small in the soul department, a seeker of sensation, an expert in the meaningless, a laboratory example of Mr. Veblen’s theories. I wanted to be rid of her, and I wanted to cry.

  Saturday was bright and hot and still. Breakfast was served in sections on the terrace as people got up, an affair of rum sours, huevos mexicanos, and Cuban coffee that was closer to a solid than a liquid. The combination melted mild hangovers. As people began to come to life it became pretty obvious that this was going to be one of those electric frantic days, with everyone galumphing about, working muscles, short of temper, drinking too fast, and playing too hard.

  Gilman Hayes put on a pair of trunks of jock-strap dimension and was hauled up and down the lake on water skis by Steve at the wheel of one of the runabouts. Hayes looked like one of the lesser inhabitants of Olympus. Mavis ahed and cooed from the end of the pier. I guess Steve got tired of it. He made a bad turn and put slack in the towrope and yanked hell out of Muscle Boy. Muscle Boy got indignant. Steve told him to go to hell and stretched his stocky body out in the sun and yelled to José to make with the Scotch. Randy, at Wilma’s request, took over the towing job. Hayes instructed Mavis on how to stay up on the skis. There was much giggling and shrill yelps and the support of an arm like an Atlas ad.

  I swam a little and drank a lot. Judy Jonah went through a regular conditioning routine, knee bends, back bends, holding one leg straight up, handstands. She had a trim figure. I enjoyed watching her. Wallace Dorn paddled around in the water between the two docks, looking as if he were enduring this indignity for the sake of mingling with the herd. Noel Hess sat fairly near me, ordering her drink freshened each time I did. I wondered about her. She’s dark and small and quiet. You never feel as if you know her. She seems to be watching you all the time. Yet you get a feeling of a lot of slow dark fire burning ’way down underneath all that placidity. She wore a yellow swimsuit and I noticed for the first time the almost textureless purity of her skin. The way she was built seemed to emphasize the ivoried intricacy of ankle joint and wrist and shoulder, making you conscious of the human form as something of delicate and vulnerable design. Wilma swam for a time, with a lot more energy than skill, and then waved in the trio off the lake and whooped up a game of croquet. She appointed Randy scorekeeper and referee, and the rest of us split into two teams of four.

  I was teamed up with Judy, Wallace Dorn, and Noel Hess, with Hayes, Mavis, Wilma, and Steve as the competition. Wallace, playing with bitter concentration, and Noel, with an unexpectedly good eye, kept up our end of the score. Judy clowned it, and I was getting too tight to be much good. There were ground rules. If you captured a ball you could hammer it into the lake. The person knocked into the lake had to chugalug a drink, retrieve the ball, replace it on the edge of the parking area. Whenever one team had gone the length of the course, everybody had a drink. It got pretty blurred for me. They kept knocking me into the lake. The voices started to sound funny, as though we were all in a tunnel. The stripes on the wooden balls got brighter. The grass got greener. I remember Judy pleading on her knees, hands clasped, while Steve took a gigantic swing and, losing his footing, knocked both her ball and his own down the cliff into the lake. I don’t know who won. I think I had some lunch.

  Then, in some mysterious way, I was in the living room, weaving, trying to focus my eyes, and Judy Jonah was supporting me.

  “Come on, now,” she said. “One big fat foot after the other.”

  “Where’s everybody?”

  “Out being mad and gay. Banging around in the boats. Churning around in the water. Come on, lamb. Judy won’t let you fall on your head.”

  There was another blank and then I was in
bed, and Judy was looking down at me, shaking her head. She walked to the foot of the bed and took my shoes off. I was still in my swim trunks. She floated a blanket over me.

  “Preciate it,” I said. “Preciate it.”

  “Poor old bear,” she said. She leaned over me, kissed me lightly on the lips, and then she was gone, the door shutting softly behind her. The bed started to veer dangerously around a circular track. I grabbed hold of it and steered it carefully into sudden sleep.

  When I woke up it was dark. I looked at the window. The outside floodlights were on. I heard laughter. Somebody was running water in our bathroom. The door opened, and through the dressing room I could see Mavis outlined against the lighted bathroom as she turned in the doorway and clicked off the switch.

  As she moved quietly through the room I spoke her name.

  “So you aren’t really dead after all, dahling?”

  “What time is it?”

  “About nine. It’s quite warm. We’re all swimming. I imagine you feel dreadful, I hope.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  “You made a spectacle of yourself, you know. Stumbling around like that. I hope you feel stinking.” She swept out and banged the door shut.

  I drifted off again. When I woke up I had a feeling it was much later. I felt a little better. I drank three glasses of water, put on a bathrobe, and went out into the living room. Two small lights burned. The music was FM unattended, some asinine disc jockey who said, “And it’s thirty seconds to Cinderella, cats, so I guess that winds up the ball game. Sorry, Eleanor, we didn’t get to spin that Julie platter for you, but …” I found the right knob and cut him off. I walked out on the terrace, to a warm night of a billion stars. Somebody came up the concrete steps with reckless speed. The hurrying figure rushed to the switch box and the banks of floodlights began to snap on, one section at a time, dimming the stars. I blinked at the lights and saw it was Steve. The others were down on the dock.