Nightwork

As I entered the lobby of my hotel in the dusk, I made up my mind to leave Washington that night. The sooner I arranged to get out of the country the better. As I packed my bags I remembered George Wales' ski club. What was its name? The Christie Ski Club. No worrying about baggage allowance, no worrying about the Swiss customs, all the free booze you could drink. I had no intention of arriving economically drunk when I set foot on European soil, but with the freight I would be carrying, being waved through Swiss customs with a smile had obvious attractions. Besides, if anybody was watching for the clerk who had fled the Hotel St Augustine with a hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, I reasoned, the last place they'd think to look would be the counter where some three hundred and fifty hilarious suburbanites were embarking for a holiday in the snow from which they would all return en masse in three weeks to the United States.

I was just about to close my second bag when the phone rang. I didn't want to speak to anybody and I let it ring. But it rang persistently and finally I picked it up.

'I know you're there...' It was Evelyn Coates's voice. 'I'm in the lobby and I asked at the desk if you were in.'

'How was Virginia?' I said flatly.

'I'll tell you when I see you. May I come up?' She sounded hesitant, uncertain.

'I suppose so,' I said.

She chuckled, a little sadly, I thought. 'Don't punish me,' she said. And hung up.

I buttoned the collar of my shirt, pushed the tie into place, and put on my jacket, ready for all formalities.

* * *

'Ghastly,' she said, when she came through the door and looked around her at my room. 'Chromium America.'

I helped her off with her coat, because she stood there with her arms out as though expecting it. 'I don't intend to spend the rest of my life here,' I said.

'I see,' she said, glancing at the packed bag on the bed. 'Are you on your way?'

'I thought I was.'

'Past tense.'

'Uh-huh.' We were standing stiffly, confronting one another.

'And now?"

'I'm not in all that much of a hurry.' I did nothing to make her comfortable. 'I thought you said you were busy today.... In Virginia.'

'I was,' she said. 'But during the course of the afternoon, it occurred to me that there was one person I desperately wanted to see and that he was in Washington. So here I am.' She smiled experimentally. 'I hope I'm not intruding.'

'Come in,' I said.

'Are you going to ask me to sit down?'

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Of course. Please.'

She sat down, with neat, womanly grace, her ankles primly crossed. She must have been walking in the cold in Virginia because the color was heightened along her cheekbones.

'What else occurred to you?' I asked, still standing, but at a good distance from her.

'A few other things,' she said. She was wearing brown driving gloves, and she pulled them off and dropped them in her lap. Her long fingers, nimble with cards, deft with men, shone in the light of the lamp on the desk beside her. 'I decided I didn't like the way I talked to you at lunch.'

'I've heard worse,' I said.

She shook her head. 'It was pure, hard-boiled Washingtonese. Defend yourself at all times. Professional deformation of speech habits. No reason to be used on you. You don't have to be defended against. I'm sorry.'

I went over to her and kissed the top of her head. Her hair impelled of winter countryside. 'There's nothing to be sorry about. I'm not as tender as all that.'

'Maybe I think you are.' she said. 'Of course you didn't call Brenda.'

'Of course not,' I said.

'What a stupid, patronizing thing for me to have said.' She sighed. 'On weekends.' she said, 'I must learn to leave my armor at home.' She smiled up at me, her face soft and young in the subdued glow of the lamp. 'You'll forget I said it, won't you?'

'If you want. What else occurred to you in Virginia?'

'It occurred to me that the only time we made love, we both had had too much to drink.'

That's for fair.'

'I thought how nice it would be if we made love stone-cold sober. Have you had anything to drink since lunch?' , 'No.'

'Neither have I,' she said, standing up and putting her arms around me.

This time she allowed me to undress her.

Sometime in the middle of the night she whispered, 'You must leave Washington in the morning. If you stay another day, maybe I'll never let you out of the city again. And we can't have that, can we?'

When I woke in the morning, she was gone. She had left a note on the desk in her bold, slanted handwriting. 'Weekend blues. It's Monday now. Don't take anything the lady said seriously, please. E.'

She had put on her armor for the day's work. I crumpled the note and threw it in the waste-basket.

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