Grifter's Game

  I doubled around behind the hotel, found the passageway to the beach and walked through it. There was a pier that ran from the Boardwalk to the ocean and I stayed close to it so that nobody would see me from the Boardwalk and remind me that I wasn’t supposed to be on the beach. It was a silly rule to begin with, but Atlantic City was that kind of a town, built with the aid of a stopwatch. The beach closed at a certain hour, the pools in the hotels closed at a certain hour, the world folded up and disappeared at a certain hour. An insomniac could lose his mind in Atlantic City. Even the television shows went off the air at one o’clock.

  The beach was empty. I walked down to where the water met the land and watched the waves come in. The sea is hypnotic, like the flames in a fireplace. I don’t know how long I stood there, watching the waves without moving a muscle or thinking a thought. I remember that the wind was cold, but that I didn’t mind it.

  I gave up the game finally, walked back a few steps onto the beach, took off my jacket and made a pillow out of it. I was early—she wasn’t due until midnight. If she was coming at all. I wondered about that.

  I stretched out on sand and propped up my head on my jacket. I let my eyes close and let my body relax, but I did not fall asleep. I dozed a little.

  I barely heard her coming because my mind was on something else. When I did hear the feet on the sand I knew it had to be her. I lay there without moving and listened to her moving.

  “You’re always sleeping,” she said. “Sleeping all the time. And now you’re ruining your clothes. That’s not very intelligent of you.”

  I opened my eyes. She wore a very simple red dress and no shoes at all. The moonlight played on her and showed me how stunning she was.

  “We can lie on this. You can ruin your suit all you want, but I’d hate to get this dress all sandy.”

  For the first time I noticed the blanket she was carrying. I grinned.

  “Aren’t you even going to get up?”

  I stood up and looked at her. She started to say something but stopped with her mouth hanging open. I could understand it. There was something electric in the air, something neither of us could have put into words. Small talk was suddenly impossible. I knew it and she knew it.

  I took a step toward her. She held out the blanket and I took hold of two corners and walked backwards. We spread the blanket on the sand and straightened up and looked at each other some more. The electricity was still there.

  I wanted to say something but I couldn’t. I was certain it was the same for her. It would have been like talking through a wall. First we had to tear down the wall. Then there would be a time for talking.

  I pulled my shirt out from my pants. I started unbuttoning it. I got it off and let it fall to the sand. I turned to her and she came close, reaching out a hand and touching my chest.

  Then she turned around and asked me to unhook her.

  I had trouble with the hook-and-eye at the top of the dress. My hands weren’t working properly. Finally I managed it. I unzipped the dress all the way down past her waist but I didn’t touch her skin at all.

  She shrugged and the dress fell from her shoulders.

  “The bra, Lennie.”

  I took off the bra for her. It was black. I remember liking the contrast of the black bra and the pale skin. Then I turned away and took off the rest of my clothes.

  When I turned to her once again we were both naked. I looked at her, all of her. I started at the face and looked all the way down past breasts and waist and hips to bare feet. Then I came back up again and my eyes locked with hers.

  No words.

  We walked toward each other until our bodies touched. I wrapped her up in my arms and held the sweetness of her against me. The silly voices of a thousand people drifted down from the Boardwalk like words from a brainless dream. The waves pounded behind us.

  She kissed me.

  And then we sank together to the blanket on the beach and forgot the world.

  I was lying on my side looking over the beach to the sea. Above the water the moon was almost full. Her panties were a wisp of black silk on the sand beside me. I watched the waves and listened to her breathing.

  I felt very strange, very weak and very strong at once. I remembered why I had come to Atlantic City in the first place, and I remembered all the things I had done for so many years, and everything seemed foolish, silly. I remembered, incongruously, Mrs. Ida Lister. I had slept with her, too, in Atlantic City. Not on the beach, but in a plush, air-conditioned hotel room. Not because I wanted to, but because she was picking up the tab.

  It had all been so stupid. Not wrong, not immoral. Merely stupid. And so had the years of skipping hotel bills, and living on the edge of the law, and looking for the one big connection that would make everything all right.

  Now, somehow, the connection had been made. I could see clearly for the first time. Things looked different now.

  “Lennie—”

  “I know,” I said.

  “It was—”

  “I know, Mona. For me, too.”

  I rolled over to look at her. Her body was not the same. Before it had been something to desire, something to break down into its component parts of breasts and hips and thighs and belly and behind, something to assess. Now it was her body. Now it was a body I had known. It was her.

  “I can’t stay much longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Keith. He’ll wonder where I am. He won’t care, but he’ll wonder.” Her voice was very bitter.

  “Is that his name? Keith?” She nodded.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Almost two years. I’m twenty-five. We were married two years ago this September. I was twenty-three then.”

  She said it as though she was thinking that she would never be twenty-three again.

  “Why did you marry him?”

  Her smile was not a happy one. “Money,” she said. “And boredom, and because twenty-three isn’t eighteen any more, and all the other reasons. Why do pretty girls marry rich old men? You know the answer as well as I do.”

  I found a pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. They were crumpled. I took one out and straightened it out, then offered it to her. She shook her head. I lit it and smoked for a moment or so in silence.

  “Now you go back to him?”

  “I have to.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then we meet here every midnight for a week or two,” I said. “And each night you go back to him. And then the two of you go away and you forget me.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Is that how it goes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I dragged on the cigarette. It didn’t taste right and I buried it in the sand.

  “This hasn’t happened before, Lennie.”

  “This?’

  “Us.”

  “So we let it go?”

  “I don’t know, Lennie. I don’t know anything anymore. I used to know all the answers. Now somebody changed the questions.”

  I knew what she meant.

  Her voice was very distant now. “We have a house in Cheshire Point,” she said. “On a two-acre lot with big old trees and expensive furniture. My clothes cost money. I have a sable coat and an ermine coat and a chinchilla stole. We didn’t even bother with mink. That’s the kind of money Keith has.”

  “How did he make it?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a businessman. An office downtown on Chambers Street. I don’t even know what he does. He goes downtown a few times a week. He never talks about the business, never gets mail at the house or brings work home. He says he buys things and he sells them. That’s all he says.”

  “What do the two of you do for kicks?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have a lot of friends? Congenial companionship? Bridge parties on Saturday nights and steaks in the back yard?”

  “Stop it, Lennie.”

&n
bsp; “Are you going back to Cheshire Point with him? To share his bed and have his kids and spend his money? Are you—”

  “Stop it!”

  I stopped it. I wanted to reach for her, to roll her up in my arms and tell her that everything was going to be all right. But I didn’t believe it myself.

  “I’ll have one of those cigarettes now, Lennie.”

  I took out two, straightened them out, gave her one and kept one for myself. I scratched a match for her and cupped it in my hands. She came over to accept the light and I looked down at the top of her head and thought how beautiful she was. I envied Keith and realized that he would envy me. It always works that way.

  “It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway,” she said. She was talking to herself now, not to me. “It was just once. It happened, we were both ready for it, it was good. But it didn’t mean anything. I can forget you and you can forget me. In a week we would forget each other. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Silence for a moment.

  Then, bitterly, “No, of course not. No, I don’t believe it.”

  “Would you leave him?”

  She smiled. “I’d leave him in a minute,” she said. “But that isn’t what you mean. You mean will I leave his money.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you have any money, Lennie?”

  “Fifty dollars. A hundred, maybe.”

  She laughed. “He spends that much on a whore.”

  “What does he need one for? He’s got you for a wife.”

  I didn’t realize how that sounded until I heard it. I watched her face fall. “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “He doesn’t need a whore. He’s married to one.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I—”

  “But it’s true.” She took a deep breath, then let it out. She stuck her cigarette in the sand and straightened up. “I can’t leave him, Lennie. I’ve got all that money and I can’t let go of it. It wouldn’t work.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Two years,” she said. “Why didn’t I meet you two years ago? Why?”

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “A big difference,” she said. “Money is funny. That rhymes, doesn’t it? But it’s true. I wasn’t born this way, Lennie. I could have lived without money. People manage. If I had met you before I met Keith—”

  “If this blanket had wings we could fly it.”

  “Or if it was a magic carpet,” she said. “But don’t you see what I mean? Now I’m used to money. I know what it’s like to have it. I know what it’s like to be able to do anything I want and buy anything I want. I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.”

  “How was it before?”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I wasn’t deprived. We didn’t starve. We owned our own home, never worried about eating regularly. But we didn’t have money left over. You know what I mean.”

  I knew what she meant. And I wondered what I was doing, trying to convince her to throw it up and marry me. So we could starve hand in hand? So we could raise children and live in a frame house in Yahooville? So I could carry a lunch pail to work and owe the bank and the finance company and everybody else in the world? For what? For a girl who didn’t even know my real name?

  But I heard myself say, “It could work. We could make it work, Mona.”

  She looked at me, her eyes very bright. She was about to say something that never got said. I wondered what it was.

  Instead she got to her feet and began to put clothes on. I watched her while she dressed.

  “I’ll leave the blanket here,” she said. “The hotel won’t miss it. It would look funny if I came in carrying a blanket.” She was looking at me now. “I have to go,” she said. “I really have to go.”

  “Do I get to see you again?”

  “Do you want to?”

  I wanted to.

  “I’ll … I’ll get in touch with you. Somehow. But I have to go back now.”

  “To Keith.”

  “To Keith,” she echoed. “To being his wife. To being Mrs. L. Keith Brassard.”

  I barely heard her. I watched her go, watched that perfect, half-whore, half-lady walk of hers carry her up the beach alongside the pier. I watched her and thought about her and thought about myself, and I wondered what had happened to the two of us, and what was going to happen from here on in.

  She was almost to the Boardwalk before I remembered her final words and realized hysterically just who her husband was.

  L. Keith Brassard.

  3

  I folded the blanket very methodically until it was a little cushion two feet square. I planted my rump on it and sat at the edge of the shore looking out on the water. I wanted to run out into the water and swim like a maniac until I wound up in some place that was not Atlantic City.

  He’s a businessman. An office downtown on Chambers Street. I don’t even know what he does.

  She would be back by now, taking the elevator up to her room. I wondered where her room was. Maybe it was on the same floor as mine.

  He goes downtown a few times a week. He never talks about the business, never gets mail at the house or brings work home. He says he buys things and he sells them. That’s all he says.

  I wondered whether or not he had told her about the missing suitcases. It was pretty obvious she didn’t know anything about the heroin. If his suitcases were stolen, that wouldn’t mean a thing to her. A man who bought her a sable coat, an ermine coat and a chinchilla stole undoubtedly could replace the contents of two suitcases without taxing his budget. A man who lived in Cheshire Point luxury could afford to buy himself a few more suits and a new batch of underwear.

  I thought about him and I thought about her and I thought about me. We were each pretty special. L. Keith Brassard—an import-export man with a new slant on life, a tall man in narcotics with a pretty wife and a perfect front. Mona Brassard—a dryness in the throat and a moistness in the palm of the hand, a sweetness that caught at you and strangled you. She wanted me and she wanted money and I don’t know how in hell she could have us both.

  And Joe Marlin. That was my name, before it was David Gavilan, before it was Leonard K. Blake, before a lot of names. Do names matter? They never did.

  But for some damned reason I wanted her to call me Joe.

  We were cuties, Dave and Lennie and I. We had the white powder and we had the warm woman. We were riding free and loose. We had everything but a future.

  I smoked a cigarette all the way down and threw the butt in the ocean. Then I stuffed the hotel’s blanket under the pier and walked back to the Boardwalk.

  I picked up the phone in my room and asked room service for a bottle of Jack Daniels and a pail of ice and a glass. I sat down in a chair then and waited for something to happen. The air conditioning was turned all the way up and the room was well on its way to becoming a refrigerator.

  There was a knock at the door. The bellhop was there, a wiry kid with quick eyes. He put the bottle of bourbon and the bucket of ice on the dresser, then gave me the tab. I signed for it and handed him a dollar.

  Except for the eyes he was a college boy on summer vacation. The eyes knew too much.

  “Thanks,” he said. Then, “Anything you want, I can get it for you. The name is Ralph.”

  He left and I settled down with the Jack Daniels.

  I put a pair of ice cubes in a water tumbler and poured three ounces of bourbon over them. While the ice cooled the liquor I sat back in a chair and thought about things. Then I started my drink. The liquor was smooth as silk. The label on the bottle said they filtered it through charcoal or something. Whatever they did to it, it worked.

  I drank some more and smoked a little. The liquor loosened me up until my mind started working again, fishing around for answers, finding new questions to ask. I should pack up, get out, forget her. But I knew that if I left, I would never find her or anyone like her again. Before, I
had managed to live without her. But now I had had her. How had she put it?

  Don’t you see what I mean? Now I’m used to money. I know what it’s like to have it. I know what it’s like to be able to do anything I want and to buy anything I want. I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.

  I had had her—once—and I was used to her. I knew what it was like to have her, to love her and be loved by her. Love? A weird and shifty word. It made me feel like the hero of a popular song.

  But I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.

  She was right and I was right; only the world was wrong. We needed each other and we needed that money, and if there was a way to get both I didn’t know where to find it. I tried looking for it at the bottom of the glass but it wasn’t there. I filled the glass again, skipping the ice this time around. The liquor was smooth enough without it.

  I had the heroin. I could take it to New York and sniff around in the wrong streets until I made a connection, then unload for all I could get. It might work. The money might be enough, enough to take us away from L. Keith Brassard. Enough to get out of the country—South America, or Spain, or the Italian Riviera. We could live a long time on the money. We could buy a boat and live on it. Once, I learned how to sail. There is nothing like it. And you can take a boat and lose yourself in a million little islands all over the world, islands where it’s always warm and the air is clear and clean. We could go anywhere.

  And we could never look behind us.

  Because we would never get away. He was not an ordinary husband, not a straight Westchester burgher with a lawful mind and lawful friends. Anybody carrying that much horse was very well connected indeed. The word would go far and wide, and there would be an unofficial but firm price on a certain man and a certain woman. Some day somebody somewhere would look twice at us. We could run but we could not hide.

  We wouldn’t last long that way. We’d start off loving each other very hard, and then every day we would do a little more private thinking about the men who were going to catch us. It wouldn’t happen all at once—we’d forget those men, and then something would happen that would force the memory of them upon us, and we would run again.