A Client Is Canceled Read online

  “Oh,” the Pooh said. “Well, then—”

  But by that time, Jovial George had come off the end of the terrace nearest the turnaround and was walking toward us, beaming. He was a man of about medium height, which I take to be two or three inches under six feet, and he was plump and pink. He radiated; at times he even effervesced. It always seemed to me that he was gay without sufficient reason most of the time, but he did surround himself with an atmosphere of gayety, and he was always glad to see everyone, or seemed to be. He was as apparently glad to see us now as he would have been to see—well, I guess, three new clients bringing big accounts. He was hearty. I’m afraid there’s no other word for that, either.

  He said, “Hiya, kids,” to the Pooh and me, or perhaps to the three of us. But he included Ann in a general, somewhat impersonal, beam, and then looked at the Pooh quickly, in the way of a man who wonders why he doesn’t get introduced.

  “I’m Ann Dean,” Ann said. “From the Hibbards’? Mrs. Townsend said to come this afternoon around—”

  “Of course!” Jovial George said. “Of course, Miss Dean. Wonderful of you to come. Faye’ll be out in a couple of minutes. Changing, you know. What are we standing here for?”

  It was a very nice question, since we were standing in the sun.

  “Waiting for you to quit talking,” I told George, who laughed with animation and said, to Ann, “What a guy! What a guy! Isn’t he?”

  “I’m sure he is, Mr. Townsend,” Ann said. “We’ve just met.”

  “Bumped into each other,” the Pooh said. “Off and on for about a mile.”

  “She rescued us,” I told George. “Thought the Pooh was a poor, forsaken old lady, I’m afraid. She pushed It.” I looked pointedly at the terrace, which was shady, which had chairs and a chaise for two, which would unquestionably have a bar.

  “Well,” George said, “no use standing here in the hot sun.”

  This time nobody said anything, and this time George did take us to the terrace.

  Francis Eldredge was there, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, sitting near a pretty blond girl of about, I guessed, the Pooh’s age, and there was a dark, tall, rather thin man standing by the portable bar. He turned as we stepped up from the lawn to the flagged terrace, and his right eyebrow was arched up much higher than his left, which gave his face an interesting, disjointed appearance. And then he put down the glass he had been picking up and said, rather slowly, “Well, I’ll be goddamned!”

  At first I thought he was expressing, with somewhat unusual vehemence, reaction to my wife’s appearance, but then I realized he was not looking at us, but at Ann Dean.

  “So will I, if it comes to that,” Ann said, and there was no grin this time. “Double and redouble.”

  “Oh,” Jovial George said, “you two’ve met?”

  It sounded pretty funny, but I don’t know what anybody could have said. They’d met, all right.

  “Casually,” the man said. “You haven’t changed much, Vix.”

  “Neither have you, unfortunately,” Ann said. She looked pointedly from him to the bar by which he was standing. He didn’t look to me like a man who drank too much—strictly a three or four cocktail man, I’d have figured—but it was apparent that Ann knew better, or thought she did.

  “The same dear Vixen,” the man said which, at any rate, cleared up the nickname. He looked at George Townsend who, for him, looked a little taken aback. He was still smiling George, but the smile looked like something he had forgotten to take off. “This lady,” the man said, “I suppose it’s Miss Dean again now? We were married for a while.”

  “Two years, three months and seven days,” Ann said. “It seemed—” But then she stopped, although it was clear enough she would have preferred to go on; that there were a lot of things she would have enjoyed saying, in addition to the obvious rejoinder that it had seemed longer. She told George she was terribly sorry, and put on a not very convincing smile—not the grin, just a curvature of the lips. “It was just—unexpected,” she said and then, to the man, still with the same smile, “How are you, Dwight?”

  “All right,” he said. Apparently he had the same problem about going ahead with a lot of things he would have enjoyed saying, and was overtaken by manners. This seemed rather a pity, since they were both mad enough to be quite interesting, but manners catch up with the best of us. The Pooh now and then insists that I am an exception to this rule, but I am afraid she flatters me, mistaking intention for accomplishment.

  “Well,” George said, “I don’t have to introduce you two, I guess. Ha.” (I don’t suppose he really said “Ha,” since I don’t suppose anybody does. He merely made a sound something like “Ha,” which was supposed to finish off an otherwise rather defensive remark.) He did introduce Francis Eldredge to Ann, Ann to Pauline Barlow, the Pooh and me to the man with the eyebrow. His name was Dwight Craig. We made suitable, mannerly sounds: Craig said it was very pleasant, but he continued to look at Ann. There was nothing casual about the way he looked at her; it was evident that there hadn’t been anything casual about their marriage, either.

  “You’re not Paulie,” the Pooh said to the blond girl, after this was over. The Pooh meant, of course, “you are Paulie, and haven’t you turned out wonderfully!” although, of course, she only meant it politely, since there was nothing to indicate how Pauline Barlow had turned out, except pretty. The Pooh then patted Paulie on the head, since she seldom kisses other women, and introduced me, of course as “Oh-Oh.” Miss Barlow and I purred briefly at each other, and then George said everybody’s tongue must be hanging out. I assured him mine was, and that I was still a gin man. I said also, to save him the trouble of asking, that the Pooh was a gin girl.

  Paulie kept looking at the Pooh’s hair and then said, “Oh yes, I remember, like your great-grandmother’s.” Craig had recovered himself sufficiently by that time to look at the Pooh’s hair too, so I went through the routine, quickly, to get it over with. He said it was certainly something and I said I thought so too, but that I made a point of not talking about the Pooh except behind her back. I said she was already spoiled enough.

  Ann didn’t say anything, but merely stood waiting to be given a drink. She had recovered herself too, and rather more completely than Craig had; for somebody who knew only one person in a group of several, and evidently knew him too well, she did a remarkable job of self-containment, and looked as poised as a cat, which is something rarely achieved by simians. I decided she was probably quite a person, and that Craig had, somewhere along the line, been pretty much of a damn fool, although he admittedly didn’t look it. I moved over to join her, but then Faye Townsend came out through the french doors from the house and, being Faye, took over.

  Faye looked as she always did, or always had when I had seen her, which was lacquered. I don’t, of course, mean that she was obviously made-up, or anything like that; Faye was a good many beauty salons above that sort of thing. She used only lipstick and powder, of course, but the powder was precisely the right shade for her tanned skin, and the lipstick perfect with the powder and with the rest of Faye, and her nail polish perfect with the lipstick. She had dark brown hair, with some red in it and it looked as if it had just been done that afternoon, although presumably it hadn’t—country people do not go into town on Saturday afternoons in summer, even to have their hair done, and there was nobody nearer than New York who could do hair that way. I’d picked up quite a bit of knowledge about such things while driving a taxicab, which is instructive work, if sometimes rather trying.

  “I’m so sorry,” Faye said, meaning to indicate that she was sorry not to have been dressed and on hand to receive us, and Ann Dean, when we came. (She put the emphasis on “so” to indicate that she wasn’t really too much broken up over it.) She greeted the Pooh and me with rather more enthusiasm than I had expected, and told the Pooh she was looking especially wonderful, which the Pooh was. Faye didn’t commit herself as to how I looked. Faye was, in a slightly different to
ne, delighted that Miss Dean had come and hoped Miss Dean didn’t mind having things a little mixed up. Faye meant, she said, a job and cocktails.

  “Of course not,” Ann said. She added she had brought some samples, and that they were in the car.

  “We’ll slip away,” Faye said. “You know everybody? Miss Barlow? Mr. Craig?”

  There was no emphasis on Craig’s name; nothing to suggest that Faye Townsend had known, all along, that Ann Dean had been Ann Craig and that—if it was true, as I thought it was—they had not met, socially anyway, since the seventh day of the fourth month of the third year of their marriage. I nevertheless wondered if Faye hadn’t known, and that she had something up her sleeve. The white dress she was wearing did not have sleeves, or any back to speak of, but Faye was the girl to get around that. Faye was the girl to—

  But Faye wasn’t a girl, except in the most relaxed sense of the word. Faye was, at a guess, thirty-seven or perhaps thirty-eight. Looking at her as she took a drink George offered her, and control of everything, it was hard to remember this. She looked older than the Pooh and Paulie, of course, but no older than Ann. Even in broad daylight she didn’t.

  “Mr. Craig and I had met before,” Ann said. “Whenever you like, Mrs. Townsend. Perhaps I’d better get the samples?”

  Eldredge got the samples out of Ann’s car; Faye sent him. He was a pleasant, blond man in his middle thirties, but rather easy, I’d found, to overlook and a man, as I’ve said, primarily interested in cows. He had a good-sized place on a hill, the old Eldredge place. It overlooked Mean Abode and was about half a mile from it. We were on the same party line. He had been cow farming, however, only for the past four or five years and before that— Watching him go out to Ann’s car and return with a package I tried to remember what, vaguely it appeared, I had heard he had done before that. It had not had, as I recalled it, anything to do with cows. He and his father had—it was no use, and it wasn’t important. I was interrupted, anyway, because Uncle Tarzan came out of the house while Eldredge, his cigarette holder cocked high to keep smoke out of his eyes, was bringing the bundle of samples back to the terrace.

  I hadn’t met the Pooh’s uncle often enough to get used to him and that afternoon, as always, he surprised me. For one thing, he seemed almost extravagantly tall, although he was only a couple of inches over six feet. He was also, and this was almost the first impression one had of him, extravagantly fit—brown, no doubt all over, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped and by and large extremely conscious of these attributes. As I have indicated, he was a great man for sports. He thought one of the troubles with the modern world was that it didn’t exercise enough and that the resulting flaccidity of muscle was one of the reasons for the prevalence of “creeping socialism.” It was like socialism, Uncle Tarzan thought, to be up to nothing more vigorous than a creep.

  (I am quite certain he thought this although I don’t believe that, during any of the times I talked to him, he said it quite so precisely. To me, he usually talked about tennis, which I did not play much any more. He had once or twice gone into more general matters, like the effect of corporation taxes on the cigarette company of which he was vice-president in charge of advertising and sales, but there, I’m afraid, he found me inadequately informed. I was sorry for the corporations, as I am for everyone who has to pay taxes, but Uncle Tarzan evidently felt my heart was not in it. He did not, I gather, think that my heart was sufficiently in anything, and it is possible, of course, that he was right. Certainly, the Pooh and I between us didn’t make, much money, which we lamented quite as much as he did, although perhaps for more immediate reasons. But to make more money I would have had to give up pulp fiction, get a job and, presumably, commute, and the Pooh and I didn’t think it was worth it. We also didn’t know who would hire me.)

  Looking the way he did, to say nothing of behaving as he commonly did, Uncle Tarzan was usually a commanding figure in any group and always accepted this as in the nature of things. But I don’t think I had ever seen people come quite so sharply to attention as most of those on the Townsend terrace did that afternoon. The Pooh and I were exceptions, of course, and to Ann Dean he was, apparently, merely a tall man, obviously in his middle fifties and obviously not giving way to them. But the others did everything but break into song when Paul Barlow came out of the cool shadows of the living room onto the shady terrace. Jovial George, all pink enthusiasm, rushed at him with a drink, Eldredge put the bundle down on the edge of the terrace—maybe one doesn’t carry bundles in the presence of the exalted—and got into a position to be shaken hands with if Barlow happened to think of it; Ann’s former husband left the bar and began to push terrace furniture around to find a suitable place for Barlow to sit if he turned out to be in the mood; Faye told Barlow they’d begun to think he was never coming down and even Paulie, to whom he was after all no more than a father, swung her pretty brown legs around so that she could get up if papa wanted the chaise she was sitting on. It was quite a sight and I was disappointed in Ann’s former husband. I thought it was no wonder he had let Ann walk out on him. I wondered if Eldredge wanted to sell Uncle Tarzan a cow.

  Uncle Tarzan didn’t pay particular attention to any of this, although he took the drink from George and said what sounded like “Uh,” but may conceivably have been “Thanks.” “Way you like it, P. J.?” George said anxiously, and Uncle Tarzan said “Uh” again, apparently meaning it was all right, or at any rate all he expected from George. Then Uncle Tarzan looked at me and this time he said “Huh.” I said “Hello, Uncle Paul,” letting manners get the better of me.

  “Still living around here, are you?” Uncle Paul said, proving that he could talk after all, and managing to indicate that “around here” was pretty much taking it on the chin.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Still living.” I was about to add “Sorry,” but Uncle Tarzan gave me up for the Pooh, and I try never to chase people with conversation. He told the Pooh, with an inflection of surprise, that she was looking very well. He had, evidently, expected her to look like a starving refugee. The Pooh said, “Thank you, Uncle Paul,” and that he was too.

  “Naturally,” Uncle Tarzan said. “Get plenty of exercise. Don’t lie around and rust.”

  He looked at me again and I said, “Gather no moss, either?”

  He said “Huh” and George looked at me as if I had committed a nuisance. I looked at him as if I didn’t know what his look meant, and raised my eyebrows. Then I finished my drink and, since George didn’t do anything about it, went to the bar and filled my glass again out of the martini shaker. The Pooh said, “Me too, Oh-Oh,” and came over and, in a low voice, said “Oh-Oh” in tones to indicate reproach. I filled her glass, ran the cold silver shaker down her bare arm, and said “O.K.” This took only a second or two and we turned back in time to see Uncle Tarzan encounter Eldredge, who had been waiting until Uncle Tarzan had finished with his nearest and dearest.

  Eldredge said, “Good afternoon, P. J.” in a mild voice. I’d sometimes thought he must drink a good deal of his own milk, or perhaps it was just association with so many cows. Eldredge held out his hand.

  Uncle Tarzan saw it, but he didn’t take it.

  “Well,” Uncle Tarzan said. “What brings you here, Eldredge? What are you after, eh?”

  Francis Eldredge didn’t say anything. He just got red.

  2

  I will say for Faye Townsend that she came through like a hostess, not only in the Eldredge-Uncle Tarzan encounter but all the rest of the cocktail party. She moved in, not on Eldredge—which I should have considered not only safer, but more likely to have results—but on Uncle Tarzan himself. She acted as if the whole thing were amusing, and as if Uncle Tarzan were a small boy. She went over to him and said, “Now look, P. J., I won’t have you dragging up that old business. We’re just going to have fun.”

  It was a statement of optimism, if I ever heard one, and not a statement I would have made to Uncle Tarzan. Uncle Tarzan presumably had fun pla
ying in the veterans’ singles at Forest Hills, although the once I had seen him it was a pretty grim affair, made the grimmer for Uncle Tarzan—if not for me—by the fact he was taken in straight sets. Perhaps he had fun playing golf, or swimming, or doing setting up exercises. But the idea of merely having fun, non-competitively and without the aid of a ball, was not, I thought, one he often entertained.

  “I won’t have it,” Faye said, further, and looked up at Uncle Tarzan and, it occurred to me, turned on the charm. There was a moment when I thought Uncle Tarzan was going to ask what brought her there, and then, to my complete astonishment, he broke up. He actually smiled down at her, and he said, “You’re quite a girl, Faye.” And then he held out his hand to Francis Eldredge with what appeared, from the Pooh’s and my distance, to be an air of forgiveness. Eldredge, instead of spitting on Uncle Tarzan’s hand, to which I would have been tempted, took it, and said, “That’s all right, P. J.,” which was fairly meaningless, since P. J. hadn’t said it wasn’t.

  I don’t know how long Dwight Craig had been standing behind us, more or less looking over our heads. We’d been giving our attention to the Pooh’s uncle and the cow man. But after the hand-shaking, which didn’t last long, Craig said from behind us that, anyway, that was that. We moved aside so he could get to the portable bar, and he got to it and made himself a scotch.

  It wasn’t clear whether Craig expected an answer, but I gave him one, on the chance. I said, “It seems to be.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “Faye figured he’d be a counter-irritant.”

  That meant nothing to me, so I made a sound to show I was listening if he wanted to go on.

  “Uncle Paul seems to be in a mood,” the Pooh said. “Somebody beat him at tennis?”

  Craig smiled a little, and shook his head. He said that, unfortunately, George didn’t have a court. He said that P. J. had been pretty surprised at that.