The Lemon Eaters

By Jerry Sohl

The acclaimed novel about the games people play and when they suddenly lose their rules...

They came together for a weekend in a California motel—twelve very different people. Plus the psychologist who was supposed to lead them. Ahead lay the most shattering hours of their lives. Before the weekend was over, a marriage would be destroyed and another saved, love consummated and love betrayed, hatred unleashed and the most intimate human secrets laid bare. Before it was over, something drastic would happen to each man and woman there.

This was a radical new kind of group therapy called "the three-hundred-year weekend." And these were...

THE LEMON EATERS

"[Sohl] handles his characters and his point well and the voyeuristic fascination will keep the readers reading."
—Kirkus Reviews

"A novelist's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
—OKLAHOMA JOURNAL

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370270897

Jerry Sohl

Jerry Sohl is best known for the numerous scripts he wrote for Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, etc. He wrote over two dozen books, mostly, science fiction and horror but spanning all genres, including several acclaimed mainstream novels (e.g. THE LEMON EATERS), romance, and humor books such as UNDERHANDED CHESS.

Book preview

When the games people play suddenly lose their rules…

They came together for a weekend in a California motel—twelve very different people. Plus the psychologist who was supposed to lead them.

Ahead lay the most shattering hours of their lives. Before the weekend was over, a marriage would be destroyed and another saved, love consummated and love betrayed, hatred unleashed and the most intimate human secrets laid bare. Before it was over, something drastic would happen to each man and woman there.

This was a radical new kind of group therapy called the three-hundred-year weekend. And these were...

THE LEMON EATERS

"A novelist’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

—OKLAHOMA JOURNAL

THE LEMON EATERS

by

JERRY SOHL

Produced by ReAnimus Press

Other books by Jerry Sohl:

Costigan s Needle

Night Slaves

The Mars Monopoly

One Against Herculum

The Time Dissolver

The Transcendent Man

I, Aleppo

The Altered Ego

The Anomaly

Death Sleep

The Odious Ones

Point Ultimate

The Haploids

Prelude to Peril

The Resurrection of Frank Borchard

The Spun Sugar Hole

Underhanded Chess

Underhanded Bridge

Night Wind

Black Thunder

Dr. Josh

Blowdry

Mamelle

Kaheesh

© 2012, 1967 by Jerry Sohl. All rights reserved.

http://ReAnimus.com/authors/jerrysohl

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Table of Contents

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FRIDAY

Max Kranak was in a perverse mood when he picked up his key at the motel office at 6:30 p.m. Rose Gallagher had seen him coming, as she always seemed to, and she had it ready for him by the time he reached the desk, so that he never had a chance to ask one of the pretty young things behind the counter to get it for him. As if this wasn’t irritating enough, Rose always handed it to him with a polite smile, not saying anything, and now he felt an impulse to shock her out of her self-containment by uttering something terribly obscene, or at least unintelligible, so that she would have to ask him what he meant by it.

But he did nothing, except take the key, nod to her, and go out. The reason was that he wanted—and he felt the need for this lately—silence, at least for a little while, a respite from the tedious, elliptical prattle that had filled his day. He would not mind the voices and sounds from the pool or the cries from the beach. They would not intrude. They would demand nothing of him. They would not be addressing him, which was the difference.

Max parked his car in the little cul-de-sac for Numbers 30 through 38, at the bottom center part of the motel complex, which had been built in the form of an elaborately staggered two-story U, very modern, very plush. Sometimes Max thought it was too luxurious for what they were trying to do, but he never mentioned it, because he liked it. He carried his attaché case and overnight bag to the door of Number 38, which was on the lower level. He was a large, preoccupied young man with faded-blue eyes, and as he tried to unlock the door he thought for a moment that Rose had for once given him the wrong key. Then he saw what he’d done, turned the key right side up, inserted it, unlocked the door and stepped in.

It was cool inside, not from the air conditioning, which had not been turned on, but because of the thick walls, the rooms above, the thick pile wall-to-wall carpeting, the cool blue of the walls, and the fine furniture. It just could not be uncomfortable; this was the feeling Max always had when he stepped into any of the one hundred and one Crystal House rooms. But of course that was the intention, the result of clever planning and foresight. It was a pity a weekend could not be planned with such elaborate certainty.

He left the door slightly ajar and went to one of the long windows and drew back the drapes, feeling a little better, less like a soldier going over the top in two hours. He looked out to see the ocean in the late afternoon haze and knew it would be as he thought it would be, a vast expanse of tired, sickly blue water without a ship in sight. He could not see the beach, because of the terrace parapet, but he knew there were no breakers.

Sighing tiredly, he went past the color TV to the desk, put his attaché case on top, his bag to one side on the floor. Standing there, he suddenly became aware of the rackety pulsing of a lawn mower and realized he’d been hearing it for some time. This was very unusual for Crystal House, intrusions like this.

Max loosened his tie and sank into the Danish modern chair beside the desk, reflecting on man’s desires and frustrations, took off his shoes, stretched out his legs and wiggled his toes in his socks, feeling the air cool them. He leaned back and looked out the door, past the parked cars that were on a somewhat lower level, past the garden that separated the parking areas, past the bright-blue pool, the opulent motel office, Crystal House Bar and Dining Room, across Highway 101, where cars flashed by, to a small patch of green in front of a small, distant cottage, where an old man was mowing the grass. It was amazing that such a small machine could create such a racket at that distance. His eyes wandered back to the motel office, where, to his amazement, he saw Jack Gallagher, the Crystal House manager, watching the mower. There was nothing Jack could do about it either, so he turned away, looked up at the sky and then down at the highway, no doubt guessing about his possible gross for the day. It was hot, it was summer, and driving would be tiring. There would be people from as far north as San Francisco and as far south as Los Angeles and San Diego, looking for a place to stay, and since Crystal House motels were known as the last word in travel comfort from one end of the country to the other there wouldn’t be much question about where they would stop.

Max wondered if Jack and Rose Gallagher still regretted the contract Crystal House had made with A.G.E. two years ago. He was sure neither fully understood what went on during the weekends. He had been told that Rose, who managed the Crystal House dining room, had balked at catering meals for A.G.E. participants—breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday, breakfast and lunch on Sunday— not understanding why it was that they could not eat in the dining room, which Max supposed was a good question. She had said it was one thing to rent rooms for weekend parties, but to get involved to the point of providing food was another matter; she preferred to ignore what went on in the units. That, she said stiffly, was the occupants’ business, not hers. But in the end it was the memorandum from the Crystal House main office that won out over suspicion. That plus the fact that it was a long-term assurance of frequent weekend occupancy.

But this did not erase distrust. The dining room always phoned before food was brought up, which was a good idea, but it was catered with an air of ministering to the damned. The weekenders themselves didn’t help, being caught somewhere between panic and anger, particularly on Saturday night, when the feeling alternated between an open hearth furnace and a deep freeze.

As Max watched them go back into the office (Rose had come out to get Jack), Max thought how easy it was to make judgments about people like the Gallaghers, people who lived on the periphery of things. The Gallaghers were really incurious and remote, seeming not to know who they were, what they were, or where they were going or why, happy as the unknowing are happy, never out of the shell, never knowing what it would be like when the veneer split, the walls cracked open and the roof came tumbling down. One had to first traverse the ice jams, live through the volcanic eruptions and endure the 130-decibel cries of pain that the confrontation with reality engenders. Perhaps they were as average as all that, being potentially explosive, needing only a detonator to start the big charge. But that was a dangerous assumption. He had met too many average people who had taught him a thing or two; he could no longer enjoy such arrogance.

He turned away from the door, opened his attaché case and started to set out twelve filing cards face up on the desk. He had more than an hour, so there was no hurry; it was unlikely that any of the group would be coming before 7:45. It was too nice a day, for one thing. For another, if they had any sense they would be charging their batteries.

In his own case he could have rushed home to Myra, eaten a hasty dinner, and then hurried here, but that would have been cutting it too thin, and then he would not have been equal to what he knew he would soon see: faces full of conceit, scorn, courage, boredom—everything but the fear that would be behind them, fear that always masqueraded as strength. He knew fear as a doctor knows death, and he hated it.

He examined the cards.

NAME; AGE SEX; STATUS; OCCUPATION

Clio Faxler; 39; M; Divorced; Retail Sales Clerk, Part-Time Actor

Erich Munson; 36; M; Married; Assistant Professor, Biology, UCLA

Beverly Munson; 36; F; Married; Housewife

Paul Veneer; 35; M; Married; Newspaper Reporter

Viola Veneer; 29; F; Married; Housewife

Ewald Perroq; 55; M; Married; Electronics Company Executive

Sylvia Perroq; 40; F; Married; Housewife, Clubwoman

Ovie Nightingale 45; M; Married; Garbage Hauler, Preacher

Eva Venable; 23; F; Divorced; Unemployed

George Arbogast; 44; M; Married; Printing Plant Proprietor

Allison Arbogast; 32; F; Married; Housewife

Gene Streator; 22; M; Bachelor; USC Student

Seven men, five women. Not a bad split. Four couples, one man without his wife, two divorced, one bachelor. Nothing remarkable there: a slice of the world, a little disappointing in its ordinariness, which was another risky presumption, for often the most innocuous groups had a tendency to explode all over the place. A good range in ages and occupations.

He was turning the cards over to see the addresses on the other side, divide them geographically, when he heard the sound of a car coming up the hill to the office, and he knew then that the old man across the way had finished with his mowing and he had not realized it. He turned, saw it was a small car, a cherry-red convertible with the top down, with white upholstery. It looked like a Maserati. As it slowed to a stop at the office, he noticed the girl, a blonde, with shoulder-length hair and a blue ribbon worn Alice-in-Wonderland style, getting out, long-legged, wearing an attractive blue dress—it looked like a cocktail dress —and blue pumps. She walked into the office.

Max did not think she could be one of his group, so he returned to his cards. Then he heard the car again, turned to see the girl driving toward him. A few moments after that she was getting out and smiling as she walked toward the door, and the way she walked, the things she wore, and her look all cried out her hunger. Or what she thought was her hunger. Or what she wanted others to think was her hunger.

Max started to get up.

Hi, she said in the doorway, raising a hand to lay the palm against the jamb. I guess I’m early.

I’m Max Kranak, he said. Come on in.

Eva Venable. She came in, leaving a moist palm print on the jamb, blinking her eyes, her lips frozen in a smile, though she wasn’t looking at him now but at the room.

Here. He moved the chair from the desk for her.

No. You were sitting in that. She moved to a chair near the bed. I’ll sit here. She wrenched around, very fetching, before sitting down, saying in a tight, nervous voice, Unless you don’t want me to be here at all. I can go, put my things in my room, maybe get a cup of coffee in the dining room or something. She took a breath, let it go. I’m all keyed up, I guess.

Max laughed lightly. Don’t worry about it.

I forced myself to come early. It was either that or don’t come at all. She hesitated, then dropped into the chair as a model would, looking relaxed and comfortable, but only for an instant. At once she started searching in her purse, saying, All right if I smoke?

Sure. He turned to the cards, let his eyes dart about, came across the one he wanted. Eva Venable, age twenty-three, the divorcee, unemployed. He turned the card over and read: 1819 Victoire Street, Santa Barbara. Application: personal request. Room Number 37. Remarks.

There were no remarks. He wished there had been, but he and the others had set A.G.E. policy and one of them was that the less known about the participants, the better it would be for all concerned. No preconceived notions. So he could not complain.

She said, Tell me something. Is it as rough as they say?

He turned, to be enveloped by her exhaled tobacco smoke. As who says?

She shrugged. The people who’ve been through it. She drew in on her cigarette again, crossed her legs.

It can be rough, yes. It depends on the group. He turned the desk chair around, sat in it. Where did you hear about it?

I have this friend who went through it, and that’s all she talks about. Eva tapped the ash off her cigarette into a Crystal House crystal-like ashtray. She regarded the end of the cigarette studiously, said very casually, She said people become intimate.

Max said nothing.

Her eyes swung around to him. What did she mean?

He ignored the surge of displeasure the insinuation always engendered in him. He said, She meant what she said. Intimate is what we become.

Eva blinked furiously, said in a flat voice, Is that a fact?

That is a fact.

The Lincoln Continental whispered along the highway, its air conditioning hissing, its radio playing Mantovani. Ewald Perroq, the driver, sat stiffly erect, both hands on the wheel, his face impassive. He was an older, graying man, thin almost to the point of emaciation, and his features spoke of an intolerance for foolishness, and this was particularly focused in his lips, which drew down slightly at their ends, so that he wore a look of permanent discontent. His eyes were bright and blue, and they darted here and there, restless in their sockets. His wife, Sylvia, who sat at his side, had in her youth carried herself with a repelling hauteur because she was afraid of people, and though she no longer feared them she was not quite able to shuck off the mantle of grim forbearance. She looked straight ahead, her expression vacant, her face slack, eyelids hovering over pupils, her head bobbing ever so slightly.

As he passed a slower car, Ewald’s eyes automatically flicked to the rear-view mirror and then to the left and right ahead, scanning the terrain for hidden roads where patrol cars might be waiting. When one drives in the 80s and 90s as Ewald Perroq did, he develops a conditioned reflex of patrol-car awareness. Perroq believed that nobody gets a ticket who doesn’t deserve one; if a man isn’t alert, then a highway patrol officer has every right to give it to him. Perroq also believed that highway speed limits are set too low for the more powerful cars, the safer cars, the better cars, and of course the better drivers.

From habit he gripped the wheel firmly; he liked to think of himself as a wound spring ready to brake, swerve or accelerate, whatever the situation demanded, confident he would do it with supreme efficiency, for it was the way he did everything. One of his fondest recollections was that of sneaking his father’s Model A out of the garage, alone and at night, using a long crowbar as a lever to get it started down the gently descending driveway without lights, jumping in, coasting out to the street, where it was safe to let it catch in reverse, then shifting to first, moving at slow speed until he was far enough away to chance second. And after he and the boys would be through gallywagging around downtown, he’d drop them off and return home, turning off the ignition at just the right moment, sailing up the driveway and into the garage, to sit there, awash in sheer exultation. His parents never knew about it, and he must have done it at least twenty times.

To Ewald Perroq these were the happy days and people were different then, and as a result he felt out of place among the malcontents, the gladhanders and the malingerers that populated the world today. He and Sylvia had no children, but from what he saw of the current crop he was glad they had none. His brother, Fred, and Sylvia’s sisters, Katy and Konstantina, all had kids, and they were a lazy, shiftless breed who did nothing but watch television and do humpback dances to hideous sounds that passed for music. One of his favorite remarks was that perhaps the kids would cause their children to mutate into the things they became when they danced, which always made people smile when they heard him say it. The truth to Ewald Perroq was that everyone was obsessed with everything but work—sports, television, hobbies and sex; that’s all people ever talked about—and of all the obsessions, the sexual one was the worst. There was smut everywhere, even in the old stand-by magazines he was forced to cancel his subscriptions to, and he refused to read books any more, because they had passed so far beyond the limits of decency. In business it was follow the leader; nobody stuck his neck out any more as he had done. He prided himself on having made it the hard way, having stood on his own two feet, asking no questions, seldom making a mistake, but offering no excuse if he did. He was not like the people who worked for him, the spineless wonders. He was not like the people who passed him by and moved up and beyond, but he could be content with his own integrity, his own capabilities, even if top-level management was too blind and preoccupied to see it.

His eyes narrowed, not at the brightness of the countryside, but at the thought of what he had been forced to become at Lennoy Electronics. He had started with Lennoy when there was just Lester Lennoy, a kid with an oscilloscope who made resistors and capacitors and made them so well he was able to get a government contract. As a result there were Lennoy parts in almost every piece of electronic equipment made since the early 40s, and a lot of it was still being used. The name Lennoy could be depended upon. It was a name that commanded respect. Its components were better, more carefully made than anyone else’s. Premium ingredients, first-line everything. That’s why Lennoy grew from one room in the rear of a radio store in Pacoima to a million-dollar plant in Canoga Park. And Ewald Perroq had been with it every step of the way.

Then, two years ago, tragedy struck. Lester Lennoy died. It seemed obvious to Ewald that as vice-president he was the one who should fill Lester’s shoes, but there’d been a reorganization, a stock split, a merger with a smaller outfit, and a lot of posturing, hanky-panky and off-the-record conferences off the premises, and Perroq found himself gradually displaced as others went up to live in the Cloud Chamber, which is what the executive ivory tower was called. Perroq was relegated to production, and they let him keep the title of vice-president. Now he was one among many. A man named Devin Axelson, a man Perroq had hardly known, in research and development, had been elevated by the executive committee to the presidency.

It was a ridiculous choice. What did Devin know about the electronics business? Oh, he could throw a lot of gobbledygook and fancy theory around, and he did. And he was good at patting them all on the back and telling them what great guys they were. Maybe the others were impressed with the way he wore sharkskin suits, or how he cut up at office parties. All Devin knew, Perroq often told Sylvia, was how to issue fancy memorandums, pamphlets, procedural plans, work evaluations, estimates, appraisals, bits of mawkish industrial philosophy. Yes, he knew how to do that, and in the process he hired a public-relations firm, a team of technical writers, a clutch of system evaluators and a crew of reproduction experts. He even installed a printing plant on the premises, so there would be no delay in getting out his official utterances and opinions, and every department was flooded with directives, bulletins, memos and whatnot, until there was no more room to store it, much less read it, and Perroq told Nancy, his secretary, not to bother him with it any more.

It became apparent to Perroq that if Devin would only forget for a while the edicts and ukases which bore his flamboyant signature on twenty-weight watermarked bond, and turn his attention to improving production and working conditions, getting rid of dead weight in other departments the way Perroq had cleaned out his own jurisdictional area, if Devin would only insist that personnel hire better people, people who did what they were supposed to do instead of talking back as they did these days, then Lennoy might continue to expand. God knows he’d talked to Devin enough about it, but it was like talking to Lester Lennoy. And Lester Lennoy was dead.

He was never asked about policy, and Perroq had often thought they might be plotting against him, but always dismissed this as highly neurotic. It was simply that they thought he was out of the race, that his opinion did not count for much, even though he was quite liberal with it. His only communication with those with the soft voices and the paneled offices upstairs had been reduced to: Hey, Wally, we’ve got to get this out, and we’ve got to get it out fast. When can we have a hundred thousand? They knew how soon they could have it; it was just their way of handing down the order, letting him know his place in the organization. Well, they had found nothing wrong in his department. He kept his ninety men on their toes, and expected them to keep their own men in line, and so on down to the shipping department, at whose doors his responsibilities stopped. He was sure that if the whole of Lennoy was run the way he ran his department, it would be efficiency itself. The criticisms he’d heard were never attributable; he knew they were voiced by some disgruntled executive who knew where he could safely put the blame for his own mistakes.

At first he thought the weekend was the most ridiculous thing he had heard of at Lennoy. As far as he knew, out of the whole plant, he was the only one who was attending, though he’d heard several others had been through it before, but his pipeline into the Cloud Chamber failed to pinpoint the executives. Then he remembered reading in a trade journal about executive laboratories and the practice of getting together key personnel for marathon talks for the purpose of improving their capacity for working together, so he did not feel so bad.

But when Charlie Enfield called from upstairs and told him about it, Perroq replied, very churlishly, that he worked all week, often more than his eight hours a day, and that he had better ways of spending the weekend than with a bunch of strangers, at the same time wondering why he had been singled out for this indignity, as if he weren’t doing his work right, or that they didn’t trust him, or that they thought he really needed a thing like this. And when Charlie insisted, Perroq, in gathering pique, told him it was impossible, he had other plans. Then, when Charlie said he didn’t think people made plans that far in advance, Perroq told him that as a matter of fact he didn’t have any plans until the moment Charlie mentioned the weekend, and now he intended spending it puttering around in the garden or watching a ball game on TV, or maybe he and Sylvia would go up to the Sierras or something. That was when Charlie told him that Devin was personally sponsoring the program for all his executives, including their wives, and that he didn’t know what Devin would say when he was informed that Wally Perroq had something better to do. Then Charlie broke the connection.

Thinking about how he’d sat in a boiling stew for more than a minute before he called Charlie back brought the blood to his face even now.

Well, he said, once he had Charlie on the line, and Charlie had given him a long Yes? He took a deep breath and said what he had to say. I guess if Devin’s got this planned for everybody, I wouldn’t want to be left out.

Uh-huh, Charlie said. You’re sure now?

Yes, he said, seething. I’m sure.

All right, I’ll tell him. Pause. I was just going to call him, tell him what you said before. You’re a lucky guy I didn’t, Wally.

Perroq’s knuckles were white on the wheel.

You’re grinding your teeth, Sylvia said.

What?

You’re grinding your teeth.

So I’m grinding my teeth. He darted a look toward his wife and saw that she had meant nothing important by it. They had agreed when they married that they would alert each other to anything they did which might make them less acceptable socially. It had worked rather well. He had abandoned knuckle-cracking and lip-sucking. And Sylvia didn’t clear her throat three times a minute any more.

You were doing it the other night at the Terhunes’.

Grinding my teeth kept me from telling him off. Did you hear him talking about cooperating with the Russians? Claims we’d get to Mars faster if we did.

Sylvia picked a piece of lint off her skirt. I didn’t know he had thoughts like that, she said absently.

Said we ought to exchange information, but I think he really meant we ought to go further than that.

Sylvia shook her head, yawned, said mechanically, I don’t know why he’s that sort. She turned to look at the scenery with a jaundiced eye, a fading flower that hormones, royal jelly and alfalfa tea were failing to revive. Why were you doing it just now?

What?

Grinding your teeth.

Oh, I don’t know. This weekend, I guess.

We could have gone to Acapulco.

Perroq did not answer, and Sylvia, viewing the scenery flashing by but not seeing it, smiled, looked at her face in the window, her sun-lighted face, and her smile broadened. It was a certainty they would never go to Acapulco, because Ewald would not go, and she’d made the remark about going there a barb, a reminder that she gently prodded him with just for perverse pleasure, for he was simply not adventurous, though she knew he thought he was. Wally did not want to go to Acapulco, or anywhere else in Mexico, for that matter, because he had a fear of being caught in a place that might not have good food, drink and something to do that he knew how to do and liked to do. He would not listen to her tell him it was not like that. She assured him Acapulco was as civilized as Beverly Hills, if not more so, and he would always reply by asking her if she’d been there. Then she would say she’d been impressed by what she’d heard, the movies and pictures she’d seen, and his response was that he had not been impressed at all. And then he would deftly steer the discussion around to dysentery, saying, My God, Heidel Gottlieb lost twenty-five pounds in Mexico, came back a skeleton. This was when she would explain about bottled water, and he would counter with the bandidos, and the Mexican gardener they’d had, saying he wasn’t ready to trust any water they served him, bottled or otherwise, and come to think of it, old Gottlieb said he drank nothing but bottled water.

She would abandon it there, but he would go on, more from inertia than anything else, she thought. He would say there were a lot of places in the U.S. they hadn’t seen yet, so let’s not talk about Acapulco or Pago Pago, Tahiti or that trip to the Mediterranean. Then he’d slyly add that what she really wanted was her name in the paper; and she just couldn’t let him get away with that, so she’d respond, What’s so wrong with that? By this time he would be ready with his tag line, which always was, I hate people who always talk about Angkor Wat and Lake Chichicas-tenango, or a reasonable facsimile.

There it would invariably lie, beaten half to death, only to be revived at some future time.

The combination of Mantovani, the hiss of the air conditioner, and the dinner they had eaten an hour before (she should not have had the wine) were making her drowsy. She turned back to watch the road. What are we supposed to talk about?

When?

This weekend.

Your guess is as good as mine.

They were quiet for a while. Then Sylvia said, "In a motel. A motel. Of all places!"

They’re always held there.

A whole weekend, she said. It’s hard enough spending a weekend with the Terhunes, the Axelsons—or my mother and father.

You can thank Devin when you see him.

They both saw the sign at the same time.

THE CRYSTAL HOUSE

One of Southern California’s

Finest Motels

2 Miles

Clio Faxler picked up the key to Room 35, drove his car to the parking area and slid it to a stop beside a Lincoln Continental. The sight of the sleek, white car angered him. Like as not, the guy that owned it didn’t deserve it, somebody like Tony Rossi, for example, somebody who made it at somebody else’s expense, just as he, Clio Faxler, was being used by Tom Reeding the way he’d been used by Tony. It wasn’t fair, being independent, refusing to play kiss-ass with anybody, because then you didn’t get anyplace. But he’d be damned if he’d change.

Of course he had to go through with this weekend thing. He didn’t really want to go through with it, but Tom Reeding had explained it to him and had pointed out how it was the thing the more up-to-date and progressive companies were doing, the retailers following the lead of the manufacturers, so he said he’d be glad to try it and let Tom know how it was. Besides, how could you argue with it when Rossi’s was paying the bill? But inside he felt it was just another example of how he was being pushed around more and more, as if he didn’t have a brain of his own, as if he couldn’t be trusted to make a decision.

He had worked at Rossi’s in North Hollywood for ten years, right after he’d straightened out and, as a result, lost out all the way around, even losing Evangeline, who hightailed it for the hinterlands, becoming first a call girl, then an ordinary prostitute, and the last he’d heard she was sharing the sack with some Negro gandy dancer in Fresno. She used to call him a lot, mostly when she was on the stuff, but she didn’t call much any more. What did she expect him to do, come charging in on a white horse and take her away from all that? Hell, he’d straightened out, and even though he was having a rough time because the word had gotten around, she ought to get it through her head it was better than the other way, better than walking on air that might give way any minute, and then that awful climb back up... anything was better than that. He’d seen Evangeline a couple of years ago, and she looked good, he was surprised how good she looked, and when she saw him she stopped the dance she was doing, a topless dance, and he wanted to run and cover her, God knows why he wanted to do that, but he didn’t, not even when she looked like she was about ready to bawl. He’d left the place in a hurry and never went back. He couldn’t stand to see what she was doing to herself. Her eyes visited him in his dreams and he damned her. Ten years, for Christ’s sake, and it’s still there. She should have stuck around.

No, she shouldn’t have. Living wasn’t easy, even with Rossi’s and the bit parts which were getting even more infrequent than her calls. He had enough to eat, he had a nice apartment in Van Nuys, and there were Lew and Skip and Abe and some other guys. They always had a fairly good time. And there was Sadra.