A Key to the Suite Page 6

  Floyd looked across at Cory in animated conversation with Stu Gallard. It was curiously disconcerting to think of Cory as being the same age as Jan. And his astonishment seemed a kind of disloyalty. It wasn’t fair to Jan, of course. This Barlund girl apparently had nothing to do except keep herself as attractive as possible, and play around at little projects like this magazine thing. She had the sound and look and manner of money. Give Jan the same opportunity, and she could …

  “Dave Daniels is moving in for the kill,” Sue whispered. “Watch him.”

  Daniels, Floyd knew, had done more than his share of drinking before they left the suite. He was a big man, with all the simple devices of total vanity. Jan had met him once, after a series of meetings in Houston, and had placidly remarked that Dave Daniels was what you might get if you could cross Marshal Dillon with a horse.

  Dave had broken up the Barlund-Gallard dialogue, and he was leaning close to Cory, talking in a low, intent, private voice, a half smile on his hard mouth, his eyes half closed. She listened without expression. He leaned closer and said a few words directly into her ear, laying his fingertips on her forearm as he did so.

  Cory did not move her arm. He moved his fingertips back and forth in a tentative caress. She turned to face him more directly, smiled, and spoke to him for perhaps fifteen seconds. His mouth sagged open. He snatched his hand away. Cory turned back to Stu Gallard. Dave Daniels turned dark red, and the color faded to a curious sickly white. He pushed the food around on his plate for a few moments and then left the table abruptly.

  Hubbard felt a warm delight. She glanced across at him, and he thought he saw one dusky eyelid shield one dark blue eye for a microsecond, but it happened so quickly he could not be certain he had not imagined it.

  “Something tells me,” Sue said, “that was a brush-off that’ll have some kind of permanent effect. I guess she’s had some practice.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it could be done,” Hubbard said.

  “Oh, it can be done,” Sue said. “Even to the likes of Dave. You decide what a man holds most dear, about himself. Some little illusion. And then you stomp it.”

  Hubbard turned to Connie Mulaney on his right and said, “If friends don’t stop this table-hopping to come and talk to you, Mrs. Mulaney, I’ll never get the chance.”

  “Just when I get Freddy’s shy little road men to start calling me Connie, you revert to formality, Floyd. Am I so darn imposing?”

  “No. And I’m sorry. It’s a sort of reversion to type, I guess. Protocol in the academic world. I hung around Cal Tech too long. If you are an instructor, and Smith is an assistant professor, and if you are twenty-two and he is twenty-three, by God, his wife is Mrs. Smith.”

  “I didn’t know you’d taught, Floyd.”

  “I hated the teaching part, loved the chance to check out some of my wild ideas in those fine labs. Three years of it, then five years with an independent lab—research and testing with a commercial slant. Then over to GAE. Result, I feel like an imposter.”

  She tilted her head slightly, frowning, and said, “I guess everybody does, to a certain degree. There’s some exceptions. Freddy, Dave Daniels … but the rest of us feel slightly displaced.”

  He realized once again that every time he was with this handsome and very human and very perceptive woman, he would marvel at her apparent love for and loyalty to a man like Jesse, who was such a big, loud, crude, mumbling extrovert. A lot of other people seemed to give Jesse love and loyalty, but so far Hubbard had been unable to discern any valid reason for it.

  “I’ll keep it to Connie from now on,” he promised.

  “Good.”

  “You certainly seem to know a sizable chunk of this group. How many would you say are here? Seven hundred?”

  “At least. But Jesse and I don’t know so many actually. We know the NAPATAN people better than the members of COLUDA. And, you know, there’s been a lot of conventions in our lives. Jesse never forgets a name or a face, but a lot of the time I have to just smile sort of blankly and mumble. When the kids were small I was housebound, but now I get taken here and there.”

  “What will you do while this thing is going on?”

  “Oh, shop and get some sun, and go to the more important things, and keep Jesse from getting too exhausted. Wifely work, Floyd.”

  The toastmaster huffed into the microphone, and there was a stirring and shuffling as the conventioneers and their ladies hitched their chairs around to face the platform. There was a traditional welcome to all delegates, and a thanking of the joint chairmen of the arrangements committee for their splendid work in setting the convention up so that it would run smoothly and effectively. There was an exhortation to all delegates to attend the workshops and panel discussions. The industry had had a successful year, all things considered. Of course there was dissension, but without irritation, oysters would never produce pearls. The exhibits this year were the finest ever. The program was the most exciting ever devised. And now there would be two addresses, one by Jerry Kipp, president of COLUDA, and the other by Jesse Mulaney, president of NAPATAN.

  Kipp, a small, nervous, bespectacled man gave, with a total absence of humor, a speech apparently intended to create a great, selfless dedication and devotion to the industry, and its place in the great onward march of America.

  Mulaney was introduced next. He stood at the lectern and after the applause had died down he let the silence grow. He looked out at the multitude with a slow owlish grin.

  “I knew I’d have to do this. And I knew they’d fix me good. They put Bill and Jerry on first. By the time Bill was through, I’d crossed out half my speech. Jerry gave you the other half of my speech. So here I am standing up here like a nut.

  “As you know, I’m the out-going president of NAPATAN, after the usual two years in this high office, where, according to honored precedent, I got the other fellows to do all the work.

  “As I stand here, I see other ex-presidents out there. Fletch, Harry Mallory, Dix Weaver. They’re honorary directors of NAPATAN now, same as I’ll be. If there’s anybody does less work than the president, it’s an honorary director.

  “During this convention, NAPATAN will elect a new president. Like the other officers and the members of the board, I have to go around pretending I don’t know who it will be. That, too, is part of our tradition.

  “Sixteen years ago I was elected to the board. Twelve years ago I was made recording secretary in spite of everything I did to wiggle out of it. Eight years ago I was made treasurer. Four years ago I became vice president. Two years ago, at the convention in Atlanta, I made my speech of acceptance as president, and that night I told my wife Connie that finally I could relax and start taking the bows for all the work the other fellows were going to do.

  “I suppose that right here is the place where I should point with pride. I don’t know. I’ve never had much trust in long lists of accomplishments. Oh, sure, we’ve got such a list. But to me, NAPATAN has been the way we can stand face to face … without agitating the anti-trust boys. And it has been these inter-company contacts which, over the twenty-four years since NAPATAN was founded, that have turned this industry from a cut-throat jungle into … into a respectable place to spend your life.

  “Now don’t get the idea everybody has given up sharp-shooting, and this has turned into a great big Bible school. Every company in this industry is still rough and tough and eager, because they have to be to survive. But NAPATAN has at least given us an arena where the rules are posted and nobody hits you after the bell.

  “I don’t know just how to say what I want to say to you people. To me … and I guess you know I’m a sentimental man … the breath of life itself is the strong, warm, honest contact between human beings.”

  He was silent for many seconds, and when he spoke again his voice was husky and uncertain. “Even if NAPATAN had failed at all the ambitious things it tried to do, I would still treasure my long association with it. Because … through this organ
ization … I have been privileged to become a friend of … of some of the finest men our society has ever produced.”

  The applause was long and loud. People here and there began to stand, applauding, and soon the multitude was on its feet. Floyd had the uneasy feeling that perhaps too many people had underestimated Jesse Mulaney.

  As the applause began to die he heard a man at the table directly behind him. “Dix Weaver’s speech. The same old crap, and it always works.”

  The man’s neighbor said, “It was sixteen years he did nothing. Not two. You should hear Harry Mallory on that subject, Ed.”

  “How can a guy like Mulaney fake his way so far for so long? I heard that with the new team at AGM, they’re finally catching up to that …”

  “Ssshh!”

  “Huh? Why’re you … Oh.”

  Hubbard, as everyone began to sit down again, looked sidelong at Connie, hoping she hadn’t overheard. But he knew at once that she had. She was staring down at the table, her lips compressed, her face pink, a tear in the corner of her eye.

  “That was just what they wanted to hear, Connie,” he said.

  She looked at him and knuckled the tear away. She looked angry. “Certainly. That’s Jesse’s special talent, you know. Telling everybody exactly what they want to hear. That’s the secret of salesmanship.”

  He made a forlorn attempt to turn it into a joke. “Not only salesmanship. Love and politics.”

  She seemed to study him. “It’s a lot tougher, I imagine, to tell people the things they don’t want to hear. But some people enjoy it. A certain special type of person.”

  “Connie, I … I don’t think we ought to …”

  She touched his hand. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  The toastmaster made some closing announcements and adjourned the banquet meeting. Dave Daniels had returned for the speeches, but he left the moment it was over. It was ten thirty.

  After the slow herd movement into the lobby, Floyd found himself with Cass and Sue Beatty. “What happens now?” he asked.

  “Suite-hopping,” Cass said. “A test of endurance. Everybody visits everybody else’s suite. By my count there are twenty-three hospitality suites. One drink in each would be a masterful accomplishment. But many will try. Our little men are up there, bracing themselves for chaos. Miss Barlund shouldn’t miss this sturdy tradition. She’s over there with Stu. Sue, trot over and nab her and we’ll make a group effort.”

  After an hour and a half of smoke, handshakings, short elevator rides, incompleted sentences and inadvertent animal contact, Hubbard worked his way across a fourth floor suite to where Cory was hemmed in by two admiring bald men.

  “Miss Barlund,” he said briskly. “They want you down at the main desk immediately. Come with me please.”

  He walked her briskly out of the suite, taking her glass from her and putting it on a table near the door. Fifty feet down the corridor they slowed their pace.

  “Did it show that much, Floyd Hubbard?” she asked.

  “Not too much. Your eyes kept rolling up out of sight and you kept dropping to your knees. But you got up every time.”

  “Where is this rescue party headed?”

  They had arrived at the elevators. “It’s midnight and your option, Cory. Want to try yet another suite?”

  “Lord, no! You’ve seen one and you’ve seen them all.” She looked at herself in the wall mirror in the elevator alcove. “I even look as if I smell like cigars. I want a dark little corner to sit in, with a place to rest my head, and a vodka stinger to drink slowly, and somebody who will talk to me and finish every sentence, and require very few answers.”

  “We take care of our journalists.”

  He found them a banquette corner in one of the smaller quieter bars in the hotel. It was called the Suez Lounge. A lean woman in silk harem pajamas played a listless, noodling piano. Cory took a sip of her drink and sighed and said, “And they’re still up there, milling around. It’s a scene I won’t have to make twice. Do you think anybody is enjoying it, really?”

  “Some of the drunker ones, maybe. But everybody thinks everybody else is enjoying it. But don’t put that in your story.”

  “Sir, it is not my purpose to tear down honorable American institutions. I have a simple theme. Conventions are lovely.”

  “Is that what you want to write?”

  “Not especially.”

  “So why don’t you write about something where you can say what you want to say?”

  “I’ll tell you my horrid secret, Floyd. I’m strictly no talent. And I’m a horrible ham. I’ll do anything to see my name in print. So I write little things people will buy. And once in a great while they actually do. Don’t tell anybody, but this is my first crack at it in a couple of years.” Her smile faded. She shrugged. “Call it busy-work. Restless female. Bored, I guess. Bored to the teeth.”

  “Because you don’t have to earn the money?”

  “Possibly.”

  “It wouldn’t be alimony?”

  She sipped her drink and put the glass down and turned toward him. In the shadowy corner he could see the gleam of her eyes and her teeth and a highlight of moisture on her lip.

  “Rather than have you labor away at the personal history bit, Hubbard, suppose I just shovel it all out in one hideous chunk and then we can forget the whole thing forever. Okay?”

  “If you want to. But I was only …”

  “I’m a spoiled brat from way back. I went to a good school. I made a very bad marriage, and worked like a damn dog to keep it going, but it fell down dead. I have one child, defective, institutionalized. I have money coming in from a couple of places. I live well, and live alone, and try to like it. It helps to get all involved with idiot projects, like the one I’m on now. I am not the least bit sorry for myself. Now you can stop prying.”

  He sat for a full minute of silence. “I suppose two can play. I went to a good school, and I made a very good marriage, and we both work like dogs to keep it going, and it seems as if we will. I have two kids and one salary. I don’t live as well as I would like to, except when I’m on the expense account, like now. I keep getting all involved in idiot projects, like the one I’m on now, but somebody else thinks them up for me. I very often feel terribly sorry for myself, without any good specific reason. Now you don’t even have to start prying.”

  He could tell that he had startled her, topped her and amused her. “How about spoiled?” she asked.

  “I would have liked to have been, but I was the third of six kids. The first and the last got spoiled.”

  “Floyd, darn you, I like you!”

  “Right friendly of you, ma’m.” They made a small ceremony of shaking hands. “But you weren’t so friendly to Dave Daniels.”

  “Him! Ha! God, how I despise that type! But later I thought that maybe I should have … pulled the punch a little bit. You see, Floyd, when I decided to do this, I knew very well that somebody was going to make the first pass. Somebody always does. I don’t say that arrogantly. It’s a fact of life I live with. And probably like. So I was braced to give the first one such a brush-off, the others would get the message. I didn’t expect … that kind of a pass, exactly.”

  “From where I sat, it seemed sudden.”

  “It was.”

  “What was Dave’s approach?”

  “Do you really want to know? There are a certain percentage of men around, a very small percentage, who try the shock approach. It must work, or they wouldn’t use it. I won’t tell you exactly what he said. He started by saying we were going to take the first chance to sneak away from the rest of the group. He said conventions could be fun. Then he leaned closer and he … went anatomical, and told me the … kind of dimensions I could expect and how long he could make it last. I think I’m blushing.”

  “Good Lord! No matter how drunk I was, I couldn’t ever …”

  “I know you couldn’t, dear. According to his script, I guess I was supposed to go all weak and dizzy and eager
. So I just turned toward him and kept my voice down and said if that sort of thing attracted me, I’d have long since bought a Shetland pony. The conversation would be more attractive, and ponies seldom get pig drunk. Then I asked him why he was wasting his time at a convention when he could be cleaning up in the dirty movie business. I used my landed gentry voice. Ah, I can be a wicked bitch. I meant to shatter him, and I guess I did.”

  “He’ll recover. He’ll take an old-fashioned country remedy, and be just fine.”

  “What kind of a remedy?”

  “A woman.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. But I fear we shall never be friends.”

  “The kind of passes I make, Cory, they’re so subtle nobody ever knows I’ve made one. The system has a lot of advantages. I get a little feeling of guilt, and nobody ever says no. But of course, nothing ever happens either.”

  “You mean you’ve made a pass at me?”

  “It would spoil it if I told you. You see, you have to stay alert, and detect one when it comes along.”

  “And if I happen to detect one?”

  “If you do, for heaven’s sake, don’t let on to me that you have. If I knew you knew, I’d run like a damned rabbit. I’m one of those married cowards, Cory.”

  “I’m glad you are, Floyd. It makes all this … sort of restful. We can kid around, and I don’t have to stay on guard. It’s rare and it’s nice.”

  “Don’t overdo it, now. Hell, let me feel a little bit dangerous, woman.”

  “But your wife does understand you?”

  “With an eerie frequency.”

  “What’s her name? What’s she like?”

  “Janice. Jan to almost everybody, including me. She’s got a twenty-ninth birthday coming up, and we’ve been seven years married. The boy is four and the girl less than a year. Jan has gold-blonde hair and green eyes and a round face. She’s bigger and heavier than you are. How tall are you?”