Bedlam and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

know what Willy Peter’ll do to a dink in a cave?”
    â€œI’m sorry, sir. It is the policy of the hotel to stay out of our patrons’ personal affairs whenever possible.”
    Her formality had iced over about two questions back; by this time nothing would crack it. And Hartley knew that he wasn’t being straight either. This bragging on love, bragging on violence—it wasn’t him. He slammed down the phone. He was still lying there, frowning and with his hands where his belt would be normally, when Garbeau came in.
    Wet, her short hair had grown longer. Rivulets wandered slowly into the bottom of her bikini. Hartley was so disturbed he spoke up first.
    â€œI tried to call home.”
    Garbeau had been standing looking startled. Now, again, he’d made her laugh.
    â€œHartley, God.” She shook her head. “You are such a natural.” She sat, picked up the other phone, gave him a different look. “But I guess you didn’t get through. Poor boy. It’s still all wrinkled up like Mr. Froggy.”
    She turned away from him and started making calls. More TV shorthand. So far as Hartley could tell, it was something about when he’d get his first check. Then, the phone still over one shoulder, Garbeau picked up a clipboard from the hotel desk and began making notes on the attached pad. The noise of the pages riffling back and forth grated on Hartley.
    â€œIt’s Friday,” he said finally. “Friday is when the wife does the errands. Plus Bobby and Janey are at school.”
    Garbeau turned a couple more pages.
    â€œThe wife ,” Hartley almost shouted, “is doing the errands .”
    â€œAll right.” She left the clipboard and phone where they were but met his gaze. “All right, let’s hear it.”
    Hartley could only blink.
    â€œI’ve sat through this riff a hundred times. You just go right ahead.”
    A hundred times. So, Hartley thought. Men fell in love with her right and left. So he was Sap of the Week.
    â€œOh, come on, Slim,” she said. “It’s the real people like you against the TV people like me , right? All TV people are artificial. All TV people are parasites. They don’t have feelings of their own so they suck off everyone else. Right ?”
    Hartley felt his ideas going inside out and looking foolish. Suddenly he wanted just to hide in a hole somewhere.
    â€œI mean, you married your high-school sweetheart . You have Bobby and Janey and they go to school. But a person like me, I’m hardly human. All a TV person like me wants is money and a good fuck. Well fuck you , Captain Hartley.”
    Her face was wrecked. She whipped the phone off her shoulder and shook it at him.
    â€œMaybe some of us didn’t go for that quaint-little-New-England crap! Maybe some of us thought a little more of ourselves than just, ‘the wife’! The truth is, Hartley, if I’d stayed in St. J. I’d be so godawful beaten-down by now you wouldn’t give me a second look.”
    He lay there bewildered. He was hurt by the crack about wives, thrown by how far off base his own ideas had been, deeply embarrassed about his nakedness. He’d knotted his fingers over his stomach tight. Yet at the same time Hartley felt—and this was the bewildering part—honestly good. He felt as if he’d just got some bit of what he needed, this morning. There was an honest satisfaction in finding out another terrible thing about himself. Hartley began to think of wisecracks, and of how he might take off the rest of his clothes without insulting her.
    But nothing came to him quickly enough. Almost at once, like putting the period with a sledgehammer, Garbeau went back to her phone calls. She looked a little thrown and embarrassed herself. Hartley had to watch her sit there stiffly, had to listen through two more conversations in that maddening shorthand code. The pages on her clipboard riffled again. So