Girl on the Best Seller List (17 page)

“Not the police. He is not a criminal yet, Jay.”

“Not to pull him in for anything, just to help us find him, Min. Look, I’m telling you, he’s a very sick boy. He’s cracked up. Does that
mean
anything to you? He’s not the way you remember him this morning.”

“Just let me call Fern,” said Freddy Fulton.

“Not the police, Jay,” Min Stewart said.

Stanley heard someone dial a number; and he heard Min Stewart continue to protest to Jay Mannerheim that the police were not to be called. Stanley tried to squint to see where a chair was, where he could sit and wait.

While he carefully eased himself up off the floor, he heard Freddy Fulton say, “She’s not home. Fern’s worried sick.”

“You’d better go to Elbridge, Frederick.”

“Yes, I’d better, hadn’t I?”

“Yes.”

In the background, Jay Mannerheim was on the telephone.

Min Stewart said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll wait here for Louie. He’ll come here.” “I don’t like to leave you, but — ”

“Hurry along, you poor man,” said Min. “You’re frantic, Frederick. Go along and find her, and don’t feel so badly. We are none of us flawless.”

“Thank you, Min.”

Stanley was on his feet now, feeling his way along the bureau in the master bedroom.

“He’s not at the drug store,” he heard Mannerheim say, “Min, let me call the police.”

“I know my boy. He’ll come here.”

“I know that you know your boy, Min, but please let me point out that Louie isn’t your boy right now — not the boy you know. He’s very ill. He’s not predictable now.”

“It was you who said you weren’t worried about him.”

“I meant I don’t think he’ll come here.”

“Where then?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Then he
could
come here?”

“He
could.”

“I’ll wait here, then.”

“As you like, Min, but I have to call the police. This is my responsibility. I’m his doctor.” “Doctor?” Min chuckled.

“Yes
doctor,
Min. I’m fully qualified for my work.”

“Do you know the word defensive, Doctor? I believe it’s part of the psychological jargon?”

The doctor was dialing the telephone. Stanley’s hands left the bureau and he came to the long mirror on the back of the closet. He could feel the arm of a chair; he knew that just beyond that there would be the bed. He could crawl under the bed.

As he was reaching for the chair, he heard Fern Fulton’s voice. “That’s what I’d like to know,” she was shouting. “How about it, Min?”

“Fern, there is nothing going on. We are concerned about my son.”

“Where’s Glo?”

“Somewhere. In the neighborhood, I suppose, though she was ill at lunch. It was probably an excuse.”

Stanley passed from one arm of the chair to the other. With his foot, he felt the edge of the bed.

“Was Freddy here?”

“Shhh, the doctor is calling the police.”

“The police? What’s going on around here?”

“Now look,” Jay Mannerheim said, “I can’t talk with you two shouting behind me. Now shut up!”

Stanley smiled. That told them. He began to inch his way toward the bed, his hands flailing the air for the first of the four posts.

He heard Fern Fulton start up again: “Well, there’s Glo’s bag.”

“Yes, the one she had at lunch.”

“Then she’s probably right in the neighborhood.”

“That’s what we think.”

“I wish I knew why Freddy’s so worried about Virginia. She’s only been gone for a short time. She’s taken her bicycle and gone for hours on end and he never — But then there was this note.”

“What note?”

“Oh, it’s all senseless,” said Fern Fulton.

Stanley found the post and clung to it. He eased himself down on the bed.

“All right,” he heard Jay Mannerheim say. “The police are alerted. We’ll have him rounded up in no time.”

“He’s not a cow, Jay.”

“Who?” said Fern Fulton. “Is Louie in trouble?”

It was at this point that Stanley Secora felt her leg. He touched the stocking, and his hand shot back as though he had put it on a hot griddle. Her leg! She was lying on the bed — all this time!

“Fern, now you go home,” Jay Mannerheim was saying. “You’re just confusing everything.”

“She’s not confusing me,” said Min Stewart.

“Thank you, Min.”

“Oh, for the love of God, do any of you realize we have no right inside Gloria Wealdon’s house!”

“Gloria Wealdon’s house,” said Min Stewart. “It’s Milo Wealdon’s house, thank you. He built it and paid for it, and it’s his house.”

“She could build a palace with what she’s made,” said Fern Fulton. “She could build a — whatayoucallit — a villa or something, with all the money she’s made!”

Stanley brought his hand up her leg, up to the knee. She was asleep. He smiled. He felt his way along the side of the bed.

“Fern,” said Jay Mannerheim, “I think you really should go home.”

“I suppose you call this mixing socially, hmmm Jay?” “No, I don’t! It’s just that — ”

“Oh, isn’t he supposed to mix socially with anyone?” Min Stewart.

“Not with a patient,” said Fern Fulton. “Didn’t you know I was having my head shrunk, Min?” “Really?”

“Listen,” Jay Mannerheim said, “I don’t …”

And Stanley Secora was kneeling, his hands were on her throat, his fingers were traveling up toward her mouth, when suddenly he knew. He felt the wet squishiness on his bandages, and he felt the cold. He lifted one of her arms, and its weight was too heavy; and when he brought his hands back to cover the sound about to come from him, he smelled the vomit that was smeared on the bandages. He smelled it, and it was just a sour, ugly odor; but in the dark, there in the Wealdons’ master bedroom, where he could not see, where he was trapped with it, caught there with it like an animal in a cage, it became not just an odor of vomit, but that other odor … that death smell. And the sound came screaming out of his big, shock-struck body, so loud it terrified even him, so high and unlikely it was like a girl’s, and the sound said such a crazy word — just “Harrrrr-verd!”; Harvard was all; just that in such a funny way, like some old she-ghost wailing in the yard at Cambridge.

P
ITTS RALEI
drove north on Route 2. In an hour he would be in Cayuta. As he drove, he kept remembering the way the book that had made him a rich man began. Like the rest of the book, the opening sentence was doubtless not destined to be remembered in the hereafter, but it did promise a quick thrill for those less concerned with immortality. And
Population 12,360
lived up to its opening sentence’s promise. It delivered a bitter exposé of a thinly-disguised small town — seasoned generously with sex. It was a very bad book when viewed as literature. In manuscript the grammatical errors, the errors of spelling, and all the other unbelievable errors of fact in place and time were overwhelming, but Pitts Ralei could see beyond them. What he saw was a best seller. The kind of book that would send all the middle-aged women in this country reeling back from their homes to their rental libraries, with their faces flushed from reading it, murmuring what trash it was, pretending to be angry for ever having placed themselves on the waiting list for it; the kind of book that would be made into a movie, that the pocketbook publishers would pay upwards of $100,000 for; the kind of book agents dreamed of one day finding in the slush on their desks. Nine months after he had agreed to represent Gloria Wealdon, the book began to fulfill Ralei’s dreams.

Now, if he could only continue to keep everything under control, the future would be absolutely iridescent.

Pitts was slightly amazed — and terribly amused — by this woman. He did not love her; she was as far from the sort of love object he would choose for himself as her book was from the sort of book he would choose to read, yet the fact remained he had broken his rule about never becoming involved with clients. Shortly after they had met, one night when he had asked her for a before-dinner drink at his apartment, she had literally led him by the hand into his own bedroom and commenced undressing him. The moment was so insane and unlikely that he had found everything about it absolutely intriguing — from the fact that Gloria Wealdon was the only woman he had ever met who had to have a cigarette during love-making, to the fact that afterwards, as she bathed in his tub, she washed her panties in the bathwater along with the rest of her, and draped them over his faucet to dry.

“Tonight,” she had said, “you’re going to have dinner at 21 with a woman who isn’t wearing any underpants.”

During the second course at dinner, she leaned across her black bean soup and said, “Oh, kiddo, I’m still tingling there.”

How on earth had it ever happened?

At times, he thought that some of the reason for it was that he felt sorry for her. She was so husky and red-cheeked and wholesome, looking like a member of the Radcliffe field hockey team, yet with that unbearable awkwardness about her, too, that was sometimes indigenous to her type woman — a clumsy shyness, helped wretchedly by the fact she was an upstate provincial.

“Oakey-doaky,” she used to say, before Pitts taught her better.

“Hi, kiddo,” she still said.

And, “Well, Paul Revere,” which she sometimes said upon leaving. It had taken Ralei a good month to realize that this was a pun on
au revoir.

At other times he attributed his attraction to her (if it was an attraction) to her own sort of rustic aggressiveness. She was the only woman he had ever encountered who gave him the feeling that he was some form of shy and passive entity being wholly dominated by an aggressive force, a force somehow feminine. It was a decidedly pleasant feeling, despite the suspicion on Ralei’s part that it was probably quite morbidly motivated. She was always directing things between them in physical matters: always yanking off the belt from his pants, or unzipping him so that the very sound of the act made him sometimes imagine that it was she unzipping her own fly, and he, trembling with a virgin’s delight. She was forever saying, “Oh, look at you, P!” with sheer pleasure in her voice. “How beautiful you are!” so that he often felt quite conceited after one of their adventures.

Yet despite all this, and the fact that she was not really attractive as a woman (in fact, she was sometimes quite an embarrassment for Pitts), there was another flaw. He had seen it when she insisted on sending food back to the kitchen because something about it was not up to par, and he had seen it in her attitude toward the secretary he employed, toward clerks in stores, and a few times it had shown itself at cocktail parties they attended together, at luncheons with her publishers, at the booksellers’ party. It was a stripe of unbelievable meanness, razor-sharp. It was the breath of life to her book, but Pitts had often met authors who wrote the worst kind of evil, yet were the gentlest, most retiring kind of men; at any rate, he had rarely seen their stripes, if indeed they had any. He had always thought that the cliché about authors writing out their hostilities and other emotions was somewhat true, that those who wrote murder books were thoroughly unequipped for any but the most bumbling kind of murder, and that historical romances were often enough written by schoolmarm types whom history would overlook and whom romance had already overlooked.

Gloria Wealdon, Pitts imagined, if she were not having an affair with you would undoubtedly be an extremely unpleasant person. Boring, impatient, and rude — the kind of person who prided herself on being outspoken and who never had anything to speak out about but the most unkind, impolite sort of backfence gossip.

Pitts glanced at his watch and decided not to be too early for his arrival in Cayuta. It would likely be a very delicate time, this time he would spend at the Wealdons’; delicate because Gloria would probably take no cares to look upon their situation as such, and while Milo Wealdon sounded quite like a creampuff, from all that Gloria said about him Pitts did not think he was the kind of man he would like to offend. Milo sounded not at all like a Milquetoast, but like that variety of male who is simply resigned to disaster (in this case his marriage) and whose bravest efforts are to retain some shred of dignity, some semblance of human communion — even at its minimal pitch — between himself and the woman he vowed to love, honor and obey. Such men were always of a gentle ilk; their wives, invariably, their opposite. That, of course, had to be their common ground, their raison d’être — their dissimilarity.

• • •

No, he would not arrive at Gloria Wealdon’s early, as she had suggested. Pitts was certain he was not going to allow her to seduce him before dinner or after dinner, or at any time during the stay in Cayuta — and the very thought of it made him wish she were beside him, telling him to hurry up and find a side road, the way she often did on their drives together, telling him to hurry up, pulling his shirt tails out of his pants while he tried to keep the car on the road.

The thought made him extremely thirsty, and he pulled off the road at the next inn.

After the bartender placed the beer in front of him, Ralei found he had absolutely no money other than seven cents. He wrote out a check and presented it to the bartender, with his driving license. The check was one of his business ones, and the bartender studied it carefully.

He said, “What’s this here, literary agent?” “It’s my business,” said Pitts. “Yeah? Whattaya do?” “Sell books for authors to publishers.” “That’s very interesting,” said the bartender. “No kidding!”

Pitts decided to make a phone call and end the conversation. He wasn’t particularly in the mood for any conversation, though ordinarily he found it quite pleasant to stop along the road and talk to barkeeps and the like. His mind was still on Gloria Wealdon, on the incredible physicality of her, and the equally incredible mentality. How she could be so attractive in one way, and so disenchanting in the other? He took the money from the barkeep and went back to give her a call. He would tell her he was on his way and perhaps invite her to join him at the hotel where he was staying in Cayuta. They could have a few drinks in the bar before they went to her house for dinner with her husband.