“And as to security,” Stud went on, “I guess you’re secure enough. You don’t know any Communists, do you?”
“Sure, I know some Communists,” Jeff said, “but they’re all Russians.” He wasn’t certain this was an accurate statement. He had met Russians in Bari and Trieste, and later in Vienna, but he wasn’t sure all of them were Communists. Wasn’t it said there were only three million in the party? And some of those he knew hadn’t seemed particularly happy with the regime. “Stud,” he said, “do you remember that girl at the Eaton party?”
“What girl? There were six or seven, or maybe ten or twelve. I don’t remember so well.”
“The one—you know, Susan something.” He knew very well that her name was Susan Pickett, and she lived at the Bay State Apartments, 1701 Massachusetts, and her telephone number was Michigan 8218, and she worked in the office of the Secretary of State, and on the night of the Eaton party she’d come with Frederick Keller, who had some sort of a hush-hush job in the European Division. All this he’d managed to learn, although he’d been alone with her for only a minute or two.
“Oh, you mean Susie Pickett?” said Stud. “Is she a Commie? If she’s a Commie I’ll be a fellow traveler.”
“That’s the one.” He realized, quite suddenly, that at least once each day since the Eaton party he’d thought of her. She’d said, “I want you to call me,” and it had seemed a definite invitation, and not cocktail courtesy. He wondered why he hadn’t called before, and decided he had been a little afraid. Of what? Well, he wasn’t handsome. He had a half-inch more of nose and chin than is usually allotted, and had always thought of himself as singularly gawky. This hadn’t seemed to matter to the girls in Milan or Vienna, or Washington either since he’d been back. So he must have been afraid because she worked in the Secretary’s office, and therefore was not common flesh, and approachable, until his application had been approved. He knew this was silly. It was a reflex from his boyhood, when he had been silently aware of the social barrier his father could never pass.
“Well, what about her?” Stud said. “If you’re going to celebrate tonight, why experiment with new stuff?”
“She’s pretty nice.”
“Nice, hell, she’s gorgeous. But how do you know she’s not shacked with Fred Keller?”
“I don’t think so,” said Jeff, but at the same time he suspected this might be true. In a city where most of the women seemed as gray and sexless as sheets of mimeograph paper, it wasn’t likely Susan Pickett would be unattached.
4
He called her apartment at six that evening, and she said of course she remembered him, and wondered why he’d asked for her telephone number if he didn’t intend using it. He asked whether she’d like to go out that night, and told her of the letter from the Department. She said that was very exciting, and she would like to go out, and should she wear a long dress. He said not to bother, and he’d be around at eight.
The apartment was a Washington two-and-a-half, a bedroom, living room with alcove, and compact kitchen. She poked her head out of the bedroom, and said she’d be a minute, and he prowled around outside. It didn’t look like a woman’s apartment. There were too many bookcases, and they were not lined with women’s books. There were too many utilitarian ash trays. The bar in the alcove was solid masculine teak. There was a man’s photograph on an end table. It was not Fred Keller, but a Marine Corps colonel in his forties, or older.
When she came out of the bedroom he wanted to put his hands on her, right then, and she instantly sensed this and seemed a bit amused and said, “Must be the perfume.”
“It’s something!” he said, alarmed that the girl could have such an immediate aphrodisiac effect on him. He thought, I’ve been too long without a woman, and then decided this couldn’t be it, because he’d been longer, and he’d never felt quite like this before.
“It can’t be the dress.” She pivoted with a model’s confident grace, and he saw that the dress was not daring, except for its color. Only a woman of her lustrous dark shading could wear such brilliant emerald. He guessed it was the way she moved, not deliberately sensuous, but with such constant, flowing vigor that you could not keep your eyes off her body.
“It could be the dress, or it could be the perfume, but it isn’t. You know exactly what it is, and you ought to be ashamed.”
“You’re pretty direct, aren’t you?” she said. “I’ll be direct too. I’m hungry.”
5
He took her to Hall’s, down near the waterfront, and they ate lobster flown from Maine that morning. She knew how to eat lobster. She knew how to start at the tip of the tail, and draw all the meat from the shell in one skillful operation. She cracked the claws expertly, and neglected nothing, not even the succulent globules of flesh hidden under the base of the legs. “You must have eaten here before,” he suggested.
“I ate here often until a few years ago. My husband used to bring me.”
She would have been married, of course, but it didn’t seem the proper time to ask about her husband. She would tell him of her husband when she was ready. “Did you know this was General Grant’s favorite restaurant?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t know.”
“It was. He had a private dining room on the second floor, and when he’d finished a couple of dozen chincoteagues and a three-pound lobster he’d pace up and down on the balcony over the garden, smoking a cigar and shaking down his dinner.”
“Tell me,” she said, watching the thin spiral of smoke from the clamshell ash tray, “what do you think of generals?”
“I think generals are fine for winning wars. Or used to be.”
“Used to be?”
“Uh-huh. I think generals are archaic, like knights in armor.”
“If you talk like that in the Department,” she said, “you won’t be very popular. Generals are Chiefs of Mission in all the critical areas, and more areas are getting critical all the time.”
They talked of the successes and failures of ERP, the uranium mines in Bohemia, British trade, Italian Communists, Chinese graft, and the Japanese Zaibatsu. They leaped across the globe to The Straits, and she asked him what he thought of the new Turkish military loan. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “There’ll be big parties in the Casino Taxim, and toasts to that noble ally and splendid democracy, Turkey. Then the pashas will take the hundred million bucks and build more villas on the islands in the Marmara. The Turkish Army doesn’t need equipment. It needs education. It would take one generation for the Turkish Army to learn to read, and another to learn how to use radar and jets and rockets.”
“Jeff,” she asked, “do you always say what you think, like that?” She asked this very quietly, and very seriously.
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I do.”
“People don’t like to hear that sort of talk. It isn’t, you know, very diplomatic. Particularly in the Department it isn’t diplomatic. There are men in the Department whose reputations suffer when any part of our policy is questioned—even such a small part as the Turkish loan. You could very well get your official throat cut, for a statement like that.”
“Anyway, it’s the truth.”
“They’ll ship you to Noumea, or Guayaquíl, or Addis Ababa,” she predicted, naming some of the traditional Siberias of the Foreign Service. “I don’t want that to happen to you.” She seemed genuinely troubled. “I want you to go to some place where you are needed.”
“Like where?”
“Like Budapest. Or Prague. Or Rome.”
He realized for the first time that she had been dropping carefully chosen pebbles into the stream of his thought, and charting the spreading ripples of his reaction. He thought it wise to parry question with question. “Susan,” he asked, “exactly what do you do in the Secretary’s office?”
“I’m just the stenographer who takes the nine o’clock conference. I’m rated as a confidential secretary, and I’m an FSS, Class Eight, and make fifty-four hundred, but all I actually
do is take the nine o’clock conference.”
“That’s pretty important, isn’t it? Isn’t that the Planning Conference? Don’t you hear a lot?”
“I hear a lot, and I never talk about it. But sometimes I think.”
He wondered how a girl with such irregular features could appear so beautiful. She had none of the vacant, antiseptic loveliness that the back pages of magazines made Americans in the middle of the century accept as beauty. But the eyes of the men at other tables were drawn away from their own women, and towards her. “How is it,” he inquired, “that you were free tonight? I’m very happy that you are, but it doesn’t seem logical.”
“In the first place, don’t you realize that there are a hundred thousand more women than men in Washington?”
“And in the second place?”
“In the second place, I don’t sleep around, and I’m not getting married.”
“You’re human, aren’t you?”
She didn’t reply at once. She tapped her cigarette into the clamshell, and then cocked her head to one side in a way she had, as if this was a difficult and almost an unfair question. “There are two answers to that,” she said finally. “The first is that I wish I could show you how human I am. The second is that I can’t.”
“That’s no answer. That’s a riddle.”
“Wait. I’ll unriddle it. I married when I was nineteen. My husband was much older. Not that he wasn’t a good husband. He was. In every sense. He was also—I was going to say like a father but that’s not what I mean. He was like a tutor—a wise friend. He was in the Public Health Service and when war came the Marines took him and shipped him out to the Pacific to clean up those islands. I’d see him every six months or so. He’d come back to get a planeload of little fish to eat mosquito larvae—things like that. He was always fighting for supplies and medicines not only for the Marines but for the people in New Georgia, and the Marshallese, and the Gilbertese. He was that kind of man.”
“And you lost him?”
“I lost him. I celebrated V-J day in a big way, because I knew he’d soon be back. I woke up with a hangover and a telegram beginning, ‘The Secretary of the Navy regrets.’ All I have to show for him is a Legion of Merit, posthumous.”
“I’ll admit that’s tough. Okay. But other women lost their husbands and got over it.”
“I know. I didn’t. Other women don’t have to take the State Department’s nine o’clock conference.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t? Put it this way. Lots of women won’t have babies, nowadays, because they’re afraid. They’re afraid they’ll lose them in another war. They’re afraid babies will be killed in their cribs this year, or next year, or the year after. Right here, in Washington. In New York, and Pittsburgh, and Detroit and every other target city. Well, I don’t want to have any more men, like other women don’t want to have any more babies. I couldn’t bear to lose another man.”
Jeff Baker wondered whether it would be presumptuous for him to ask about Keller, and he decided it wouldn’t be because she would understand it was necessary for him to know all he could know of her. “What about Fred Keller?” he said.
“I go out with him, very occasionally.”
“That all?”
“That’s all. He’s a dear.”
“You mean he doesn’t make passes at you. That’s what a woman means when she says a man’s a dear.”
“As a matter of fact, he doesn’t. When he takes you out you feel that he’s wearing you like a carnation in his buttonhole. He’d never do anything so crude as make a pass. Fred’s a perfectionist. I don’t know exactly how he’d go about having an affair with a girl, but I have a hunch the preliminaries would be sending orchids, and introducing you to his mother.”
“He didn’t look so damn safe to me,” Jeff said. Keller was spare and tanned, still a bachelor at forty, and rich enough to have twelve acres in Berwyn, a shooting box on the Eastern Shore, and an ocean-front villa near Palm Beach. He had once been runner-up for the national squash title, and in 1947 had been picked as one of America’s ten best-dressed men.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s not safe,” said Susan Pickett, and Jeff knew she was not speaking of her relations with him, but of something else.
“Go on,” he said.
“Nothing, except sometimes he gives me the shivers. He’s so casual about war. When he talks about atomic bombs his mouth waters as if they were lemons.”
“That’s not unusual in these times. And after all, he’s not so important. He’s not Undersecretary of State, or Chief of a bureau or a division or even a section. He just has some sort of a control job on the European desk.”
“He is important,” she insisted. “He gets into everything. And he’s going to Budapest.”
Jeff recalled she had mentioned Budapest before. “Didn’t you recommend Budapest for me?”
“I suppose so. It’s been on my mind.”
“What’s cooking in Budapest?”
“Nothing that isn’t cooking in Prague and Salonika and Trieste and Vienna and Berlin and Seoul and everywhere else where we’re face to face with the Russians. Only in Budapest it’s closer to burning.” She was silent while the waiter laid the check on the table. “Jeff,” she added when the waiter was gone, “sometimes I forget I’m not supposed to think. I’m just the girl who takes the nine o’clock conference, and I need my job, and if I do too much thinking and talking I’ll lose it.”
“What’re you afraid of—thought control police?”
“Sure. We all are.”
“Okay,” he agreed, “we won’t talk shop any more. Anyway I like Budapest. It lives.”
“You’ve been there?”
“When I was a kid. In the summer after my sophomore year in college. The Department sent my father to help in an audit of the Balkan Missions, and we made a trip up the Danube. What a city!”
“If you’re interested in what’s going to happen to this world,” she said quietly, “you should try to go there again.”
He knew it was not necessary to talk any more of it. She was a puzzling girl, a skein of fear grown over her emotions, masking her desires, but he did not doubt her judgment. If she thought Budapest would be an interesting and instructive post, then he’d believe her.
It was something to remember, but not to count on.
Outside, in a taxi, he suggested the Footlight Club, but she said that while it was a nice idea, and she loved to dance, it was too late for her to go anywhere else. She had to be in the office, typing the agenda for the nine o’clock conference, at eight every morning. Therefore she didn’t stay out late except Saturday nights.
6
He took her to her apartment door. She said, “I’d ask you in, but it wouldn’t do either of us any good.”
“I guess not.” Still, he didn’t want to leave. She seemed very small, standing close to him there in the doorway. When she was seated her straight shoulders and the way she held her head gave her an illusion of height, but when she stood up she really wasn’t very tall.
“Well, goodbye,” she said, her fingers poised to turn the key.
“Well, goodnight,” he said, but he didn’t go.
“You don’t feel very platonic, do you?”
“Frankly, no.”
“I’m not going to be coy, and tell you I never let a man make love to me the first time I’m out with him. I’m just going to say I’m sorry.”
He cupped her shoulders in his hands. “Susan, this isn’t the way I was hoping it would be. Look at me.”
She kept her eyes on the key. “I didn’t want it to be like this either. I wanted to go out with you and see if something wouldn’t happen. It didn’t.”
“Suppose we are a pinch of ashes in the first day of World War number three? Why not have what we can now? I’m afraid I sound silly—like a kid quoting Omar.”
“Oh, no, Jeff. You’re not silly. You’re perfectly logical.”
?
??Well?”
She didn’t attempt to move, or say anything more, until his fingers loosened. “I’m not afraid for myself,” she said then. “If I thought the world would go up in one big bang I honestly wouldn’t care much. I think I’d be sort of relieved. It’s just that I’m afraid to have anyone else because I’ve got the damndest premonition I’d lose him.”
“If you went to a psychiatrist,” Jeff said, “which I think you ought to do, he’d tell you you were wrong.”
“I’m sure of it. If I thought I could have a man without too many inner complications, well, we’d be in there, and not out here. Only I know I can’t, Jeff. I’ve only had one man in my life. Well, not counting schoolgirl experiments. And if I had another I’d feel the same way towards him that I did towards my husband and then the war would come along and kill him.”
“The trouble with you, Susan, is that you won’t take a chance on the world.”
“I don’t see why I should take a chance when I know that the cards are stacked. Now go on home, Jeff. I’ll stay as I am.”
7
He walked up Massachusetts to Dupont Circle, feeling empty and frustrated and baffled. Stud was listening to the eleven o’clock news. “I see you didn’t make the grade,” Stud greeted him. “Not even lipstick. Is she tied up with Keller?”
“No, she’s tied up with herself.”
“There are two girls on the floor below,” Stud said, “who have been running up here all evening to borrow ice cubes, glasses, bottle openers, and cigarettes. They work in Archives, and they’re having a party for the Junior Archivists, Division of Useless Executive Papers. They want us to come down when the party is over.”
“Not me,” Jeff said.
“They’re not bad,” Stud said. “They develop a lot of compression, working down there three floors below the Archives Building. They claim all the men in Archives are unburied cadavers.”