Nightmare in Pink Read Free

speculations. In the living place they tuck themselves in and walk carefully. How would we be together? It is the great unasked question. Eyes get a little shifty. Excuses are made in a lofty tone, and the special advantages are pointed out in the brass voice of a Greek guide describing the ruined temples.
    Nina said, "Excuse the mess. I do a lot of work here."
    I gave an unwelcome blurt of laughter. She stared at me as if I'd lost my mind. But I couldn't tell her about the wild Freudian slip I had suddenly remembered. Years ago I had taken a shy girl to dinner. She had eaten like a wolf pack, even to having a second piece of coconut-cream pie. I had gone up to her place for the well-known nightcap. The girl she lived with was away for the weekend. We were feeling each other out, making chatty talk on one level, creating sensual tensions on another. I was deciding just when and how to make my pass, and she was wondering when it was coming and what to do about it-acceptance or rejection. She sighed and smiled and gave a little hitch to her skirt and said, "My goodness, I shouldn't have had that second piece of pants."
    ."Is something so terribly funny?" Nina demanded.
    "No, I just…" I was saved by the telephone. She hurried to it and answered.
    "Hello? Oh hi, Ben. What? No. No, I'm sorry I guess not. No, dear, it isn't like that. I'm on two more accounts now, and there just doesn't seem to be any time."
    Her voice went on, polite, personal, unswervingly firm in rejection of whatever pitch Ben was making. I wandered over to the pushpin wall and looked at her work. One drawing of a jar was striking. It had a severe and classic beauty. She hung up and came over to me.
    "Do you like that one?" she asked.
    "Very much."
    "You've got a pretty good eye, McGee. The client didn't like it. We go around telling each other that good taste will sell. Maybe it will, at the right time and the right place. But that is why commercial is a kind of vulgarity upgraded just enough to look like good the best ones in the business are the ones who can toss that kind of crap off naturally, and really believe it's great."
    I looked down at her thoughtful face. "The trouble with that jar, Nina, what's there to put in it?"
    "You have a point. Wait right here." She went into the small bedroom and closed the door. I prowled the place. I looked at the books and the records. Aside from an unwholesome taste for string quartets, and a certain gullibility about pre-digested sociology, she passed the McGee test with about a B+. Hell, an A-. Maybe somebody had given her the Vance Packard books. He has the profitable knack of making what everybody has known all along sound like something new and astonishing. The same way Norman Vincent Peale invented Christianity and James Jones designed the M-1 rifle. I could relate all three to her handsome jug. Theirs was an upgraded vulgarity.
    She came out suddenly and marched across to me and put ten thousand dollars into my hand. I sat on her couch and bounced it in my hand and took the two rubber bands off it. Three packs of used bills in the bank wrappers, initialed by whoever had done the wrapping. Two packs of fifty fifties. One pack of fifty hundreds. She stood in her pale gray blouse and her suit skirt, in her dark pumps and her nylons and her discontent, and looked at me with a small defiant face. This was her gesture of disappointing love, and it seemed a shame to bitch it for her. I riffled the edges of the bills in silence, and snapped the rubber bands back on. I flipped the little brick of money at her head and she dodged wildly and stuck one hand up and surprised herself by catching it. She stared blankly at me. "What's wrong?"
    I swung my legs up and stretched out on her couch, fingers laced at the nape of my neck. "It's a pretty little egg, honey, but I want to meet the goose."
    She stomped her foot. "You son-of-a-bitch!"
    "It tempted me a little, but not enough. This goose seems to be named Armister."
    "Get