Free Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams

out, very slowly, very cool. He simply said for maybe the hundredth time that she was the spiffiest girl in town. (“Spiffy” was a word Buck liked a lot—oddly enough, a word that Jill’s stepfather, Ralph Carter, also used. Ralph liked to tell Carolinethat she was very spiffy.) And then Buck said, “I know guys who’d give a thousand bucks for a date with you.”
    They went on talking after that, and Jill laughed it off, but as soon as he had said that, Jill knew exactly what was meant. Later he said it again. “Well, you do have some curious friends,” Jill told him. And, “Just how much would you get out of it, Bucks?”
    Buck laughed too, as though they had just had a harmless, mildly sophisticated joke between them. Old friends.
    A week or so later, though, he called her. “A friend of mine from D.C. comes through here a lot, and he says he’s seen you around. Says he met you one night at Harry’s but you wouldn’t remember, probably. Anyway, he’s dying for a date.”
    The mechanics of it, then, were very much like the old game of blind dates, a friend recommending a friend. You’d go out with the friend, and if you liked him, if you wanted to, you could easily end up in bed—in the old days Jill very often would. (But now no one would be quite so easy about it, probably, unless you handed out rubbers, something Jill really can’t see doing. You certainly can’t believe anyone’s stated history; the straightest guy in the world might have had some swell gay fling. You can’t tell, and nothing’s all that safe any more.)
    In any case, no one has that kind of blind date these days—and in this case, with the Game, ending up in bed is the main part of the deal. You both know that all along, all during the early part of the date, the dinner, whatever.
    And after the first couple of times, Game times, Jill knew that the next day, in her office high up in the Transamerica Pyramid, she would receive a very large spray of roses, at least three dozen (there went a lot of Buck’s profits), into which was thrust a thick envelope in which were ten C-notes. Romantic old Buck, such a valentine of a payoff.
    And that was the Game.
    â€œI just happened to have this overload of cash,” Jill explained the first time she got all that money, at Wilkes, where God knows they were used to big notes—as she bought a great new dress, the shortest anyone had seen around that year, in dark-red silk.
    â€¢ • •
    The date. That first guy was very nice (clever Buck). A little old, early sixties, probably, and a little on the scrawny side for Jill’s particular taste: she prefers men to be about ten or fifteen pounds overweight, no less or more, and she knows this prejudice to be a little odd, even very slightly kinky. But this guy had good thick gray hair, and he was a doctor, for heaven’s sake, talk about reassuring.
    It was all arranged by Bucks, of course. They met in the upper bar at the St. Francis, the Compass Rose. Jill wore a white gardenia. (“A touch of Billie,” Bucks told her. “Billie never turned tricks, you stupid prick.” “Oh, don’t be too sure.”) Then they had dinner in the English grill: it was clear that they were not to leave that hotel, where the doctor of course was staying.
    Dinner was strange, to say the least, strange and for Jill intensely exciting, in some crazy way. As they talked and talked about absolutely nothing, Jill studied that man. John, he said his name was, and it could have been. Giving no thought at all to what she was saying (if he thought she was a real airhead, no matter), Jill tried hard to imagine or predict his sexual tastes. How she could really turn him on, make him wild, just as though she were really a hooker. As though she didn’t care at all about her own fun.
    And at the same time she was playing with the idea of backing off, out,