Nightwork

'I'm worried about my husband,' Flora Sloane said to me. We were having a drink before lunch, seated in the sunshine on the terrace of the Corveglia Club, among the maritime Greeks, the Milanese industrialists, the people who were photographed beside pools at Acapulco, and the ladies of various nationalities who preyed on them all. Flora Sloane, who obviously had not been what has in other times been called 'gently reared' and who lapsed, when excited, into a language and an accent you might expect to hear from a waitress in a diner in New Jersey patronized almost exclusively by truck drivers, was completely at home here and accepted all attention or deference with regal aplomb. I, on the other hand, felt like a man who had just been dropped behind enemy lines.

The temporary membership had cost me a hundred and twenty francs for two weeks, but where the Sloanes went I had to follow. Not that Sloane himself was very much in evidence. In the mornings, according to Flora, he was on the phone back to his office in New York for hours on end and in the afternoon and evening he played bridge.

'He won't even have a tan when we get back to Greenwich,' she complained. 'People won't believe he's ever seen an Alp.'

Meanwhile, I had the honor of leading Flora Sloane down the bill and buying her lunch. She was a fair skier, but one of those women who squealed when she came to a steep bit and constantly complained of her boots. I spent quite a bit of time kneeling in the snow, loosening the hooks, then tightening them again after three turns. I had refused to be seen in the red pants and the lemon parka I had found in the suitcase and had bought myself a sensible navy blue outfit. At great expense.

At night, there was the inevitable sweaty dancing and the champagne. Madame Sloane was becoming progressively more amorous, too, and had a nasty habit of sticking her tongue in my ear while we danced. I wanted to get into the Sloanes' room and search it, but not that way. There was a choice of reasons for my coolness, not the least of which was the total lack of all response to any sexual stimulation, dating from the moment I had realized that my seventy thousand dollars had disappeared. Money was power. That I knew. It had not occurred to me that its absence involved impotence. Any attempt at performance on my part, I was sure, would be grotesquely inadequate. Flora Sloane's flirtatiousness was trying enough. Her derision would be catastrophic. I foresaw years of psychiatry ahead of me.

My efforts at detective work had been pathetically useless. I had knocked at the Sloanes' door several times on one pretext or another in the hope of being invited in so that I could at least take a quick, surreptitious look around their room, but whether it was the wife or the husband who responded, all conversations took place on the threshold, the door just barely ajar.

I bad opened my door every night when the hotel slept, but the brown shoes had never been in the corridor. I had begun to feel that I had been the victim of a hallucination in the train compartment - that Sloane had never worn brown shoes with gum soles and never had a red wool tie around his neck. I had brought up the subject of the confusion of luggage at airports these days, but the Sloanes had shown no interest. I would stay the week, I had decided, on the off chance that something would happen, and then I would leave. I had no idea of where I would go next. Behind the Iron Curtain, perhaps. Or Katmandu. Drusack haunted me.

Those miserable bridge games.' Flora Sloane sighed over her Bloody Mary. 'He's losing a fortune. They play for five cents a point. Everybody knows Fabian's practically a professional. He comes here for two months each winter and he walks away rich. I try to tell Bill that he's just not as good a bridge player as Fabian, but he's such a stubborn man he refuses to believe that anybody is better than him at anything. Then when he loses he gets furious at me. He's the worst loser in the world. You wouldn't believe some of the things he says to me. When he comes up to the room after one of those awful games, it's nightmare time. I haven't had a decent night's sleep since I came up here. I have to drive myself to put on my ski boots in the morning. By the time I leave here, I'll be a worn-out old hag.'

'Oh, come now. Flora.' I made the awaited objection. 'You couldn't look like a hag if you tried. You look blooming.' This was true. At all hours of the day and night, in no matter what clothes, she looked like an overblown peony.

'Appearances are deceiving,' she said darkly. 'I'm not as strong as I look. I was very delicate as a child. Frankly, honey, if I didn't know you were waiting for me downstairs every morning, I think I'd just stay in bed all day.'