7
DRINKING WITH MY AIRLINE STEWARDESS IN THE MAI TAI LOUNGE, I would look away when our eyes met. I hardly knew how to talk. Sally Porringer provided the only near model to Modene, and with Sally there had rarely been problems with conversation—one pushed buttons to evoke themes: how much she loved her children; how much she disliked her husband; how much she had loved her first love, the football player; how much she loved me; how worthless I was; how irresponsible; how close was suicide. Sally had her share of open wounds and uncauterized anger.
Modene Murphy, however, if one could believe her, was ready to enjoy everything. She liked the beach because it was so clean. “They take care of it.” She liked the pool at the Fontainebleau because “the barman makes the best Planter’s Punches in Miami Beach,” and the Mai Tai Lounge “because I love to get drunk here.” She even approved of Eastern Airlines because “I have it absolutely under my thumb. You suffer,” she informed me, “through your first few years on an airline because they can move you about at their merest whim, but now I have it under control. I not only choose my routes, but the days I work.”
“How did you get all that leverage?”
“Let’s talk about you,” she said.
“I’m not interesting,” I told her. “Or, at least, electronics is not interesting. Not if you’re selling it as I am. It’s just wires.”
What compounded my discomfort was that I had a tape recorder going in the attaché case accompanying me today (newest of the toys to come down to Zenith from Quarters Eye) and so I would be obliged to listen to my own remarks later.
“You may be an expert,” she said, “but it is not in electronics.”
“What kind of expert am I, then?”
“You are able to find out things about people that they don’t want you to know.”
“Well, that’s true. You’re right. I’m a private detective.”
“I like you,” she said. Then she laughed. “I approve of your style. It’s so controlled.”
“Controlled? Why, I twitch every time I look at you.”
She slapped my hand lightly.
“In fact,” I said, “I’m mad about you.” I stammered slightly as I said this and realized it was the only way to make such a remark. I sounded sincere to myself. “That is,” I said, “I have known women before who meant a great deal to me, and there is one woman I have been in love with for many years, but she’s married.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Modene told me wisely.
“But I have never experienced the . . . the impact I felt the first time I looked at you.”
“Oh, you are trying to woo me. Beware! The first time I saw you was in First Class with your head down. All I could notice is that you don’t take very good care of your scalp.”
“What?”
“Dandruff,” she told me solemnly, and burst into laughter at the look on my face. “Maybe it was only lint,” she said, “but you certainly don’t have a woman looking after you.”
“The way Sparker’s wife takes care of him?”
“Who?”
“Bradley Boone, the Life man.”
“Oh, him. I have no interest in him.”
“Why did you offer the impression that you did?”
“Because I want someone to teach me photography.”
“Is that why you gave off that very large suggestion of liking him?”
“I just go after what I want and ensnare it.” She gave vent to her gutty earthy little laugh as if she couldn’t believe how outrageous she was.
“I think you’re terrific,” I told her. “You gave me such a turnaround. I never felt that before. Not even with the woman I love.” I looked at her eyes and took a large swallow of my drink. I had already decided I was not going to pass the raw transcript on this over to Harlot.
“I want to kiss you,” she said.
She did. It was a small embrace, but her lips were soft and I certainly didn’t get to the bottom of them. “You’re earthy,” she said as she withdrew.
“That’s good, I hope.”
“Well, I seem to attract earthy people.”
My lips were feeling the tactile echo of her lips, and my breath was resonant. Earthy? Well, that was news! “Who are some others you would characterize in such fashion?”
She wagged a finger at me. “Kiss and tell.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I do. My life is private to me. I cater to my privacy.”
“Don’t any of your friends know anything about you?”
“Let’s talk of something else,” she told me. “I know why I want to see you, but why do you want to see me?”
“Because one look at you and—I have to confess—a force came over me. I never felt that before. It’s the truth.”
What was the truth, I wondered? I had been lying for so long to so many people that I was beginning to feel mendacious relations with myself. Was I a monster or merely in a muddle? “What I guess,” I said to her, “is that you feel this kind of impact when you meet someone who’s absolutely equal to yourself.”
She looked dubious. Was she thinking of the condition of my scalp?
“Yes,” she said, and gave me a very careful second kiss as if assaying samples for ore content.
“Can we go somewhere?” I asked.
“No. It’s ten after six and I have to leave in twenty minutes.” She sighed. “I can’t go to bed with you, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve reached my quota.” She touched my hand. “I believe in serious affairs. So at any given time I only allow myself two. One for stability; one for romance.”
“And now you are fully booked?”
“I have a wonderful man who takes care of me in Washington. I see him when I’m there. He protects me.”
“You don’t look as if you need protection.”
“Protection is the wrong word. He . . . takes care of my needs on the job. He’s an executive at Eastern. So he makes certain I get the flight schedules I want.”
Her executive sounded somewhat smaller than the giants Harlot had been promising.
“Do you love him?”
“I wouldn’t say that. But he’s a good man, and he’s absolutely dependable. I can count on him trying to make me happy.”
“You don’t talk like any girl I’ve ever known.”
“Well, I would like to think I’m a bit unique.”
“You are. You certainly are.”
She tapped the bar with one very long fingernail. “Right here, however, Miami Beach, is my port of choice.”
“You have the longest fingernails,” I said. “How do you keep from breaking them on the job?”
“Constant attention,” she said. “Even then I’ve been known to rip one occasionally. It’s painful and it’s expensive. I spend half my pay getting nail splints.”
“I would think this hotel is expensive.”
“Oh, no. It’s summertime. I get a rate here.”
“Isn’t it far from the airport?”
“I don’t care to stay with the other girls and the pilots. I’d rather spend the time traveling in the hotel van.”
“So you don’t like being with your crew?”
“No,” she said, “there’s no point to it unless you want to marry a pilot, and they are unbelievably stingy. If three stewardesses and the pilot and the copilot share a dollar-and-eighty-cent taxi ride with tip, depend on it, the pilot will ask each of the girls to contribute thirty-six cents.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s small beer.”
“I still haven’t told you what I want you to do for me.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“Do you like Frank Sinatra?” she asked.
“Never met him.”
“I mean, do you like his singing?”
“Overrated,” I replied.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You oughtn’t to ask a question if you have no respect for the answer.”
She nodded, as if to indicate that she was certainly familiar with my variety of reply. “I know Frank,” she said.
“You do?”
“I dated him for a while.”
“How did you ever meet him?”
“On a flight.”
“And he took your number?”
“We exchanged numbers. I wouldn’t reveal something so private to me as my phone unless a celebrity was ready to offer his first.”
“What if his proved to be a false number?”
“That would be the end of him.”
“It seems to me that you got to know Sinatra well.”
“I don’t see how that is any of your business. But maybe I’ll tell you someday.”
We were now on our third drink. Six-thirty was certainly approaching. I was studying the pastel curls and whorls of the Mai Tai Lounge which suggested the French curves of a draftsman’s template. Through a plate-glass window, I could look out on an enormous pool, amoeboid in shape. Along one arm of that man-made lagoon was a man-made cave and there another bar had been installed where swimmers could sit in their bathing suits. Down the near distance, on the other side of a pedestrian walk, past a wide beach whose packed sand looked to have received fully as much treatment from rolling equipment as a tennis court, were the waves of a lukewarm sea.
I did not know how to pursue the subject of Frank Sinatra. Was he one of the two prominent gentlemen who did not add up when taken together?
“What is it that you want to find out about Sinatra?” I asked.
“That’s not the point of our conversation,” she replied. “I have no interest in Frank at this time.”
“Although he was once your port of choice.”
“You have a nasty streak,” she said. “And that’s just as well. Because what you may discover if we see each other again is that I might prove your equal.”
“Nothing could be more nasty than not seeing me again. So, I will tell you. I am sorry.”
“Let me make it clear. I do have a port of choice here in Miami. As you put it. Only, he’s up in Palm Beach when he’s in town. And I am in love with him.” She pondered this as solemnly as if she were indeed observing her heart, and said, “Yes, I love him when I am with him.”
“All right,” I said.
“But I am not often with him. He is a very busy man. In fact, he’s incredibly busy right now.”
“Well, what can I find out for you?”
“Nothing. In fact, you will never know who this man is.”
I swallowed the last of my drink. It was 6:28 and I decided to take one firm St. Matthew’s resolve that I would be up and on my way at the hair-crack exactitude of 6:30 P.M. “Then I guess there is nothing to do for you after all.”
“You have to stay a minute,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Of course you can.” It occurred to me that she wasn’t altogether unlike my mother. Did imperious women pass on hints to one another along filaments of nocturnal silk? “In fact, this man is so seldom to be seen these days that I’m contemplating a change. There is another man paying a great deal of attention to me.”
I took a leap. “Is he a friend of Sinatra’s?”
“Yes.” She looked at me. “You are good at your work, aren’t you?”
I was beginning to wonder if maybe I might be. “Yes,” I said, “but I can’t do a thing for you unless you tell me his name.”
“Well, I can give you his name but it won’t be the right one. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s not.”
“Might be a start.”
“I know it’s not his real name. Sam Flood. He calls himself that, but I never came across anybody in the newspapers with that name, and he is a man whom others respect so much that he has to be prominent.”
“How are you certain that he counts for as much as you think?”
“Because Sinatra doesn’t respect anyone personally when they’re around him, but he respects Sam Flood.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” I said, “same time here. By then I’ll know who Sam Flood is.”
“I can’t meet you. I’m supposed to work the 6:00 P.M. flight tomorrow evening,” she told me.
“Why don’t you get your executive in Washington to hold you over one more night? I thought you controlled such things.”
She took a new measure of me. “All right,” she said. “If you can leave a message before 2:00 P.M. tomorrow that you have the real identity of Sam Flood, I will take care of switching my flight day.”
We shook hands. I wanted to kiss her again but a glint in her eye suggested that I should not.