Free Nightwork by Irwin Shaw

been a bad poker player himself in college. “It’ll be like old times. I’ll arrange everything.”
    The phone rang and Hale went over to the desk, picked up the instrument, and listened for a moment. “I’ll be right over, sir,” he said and put the phone down. “I’m sorry, Doug, I have to go. The daily eleven A.M. crisis.”
    I stood up. “Thanks for everything,” I said, as we walked toward the door.
    “Nada,” Hale said. “What’re friends for? Listen, there’s a cocktail party at my house tonight. You busy?”
    “Nothing special,” I said.
    “Seven o’clock.” We were in the outer office now. “I’ve got to run. Miss Schwartz will give you my address.” He was out of the door, moving fast, but still preserving a statesmanlike decorum.
    Miss Schwartz wrote on a card and gave it to me, smiling radiantly, as though she were ennobling me. Her handwriting was as beautiful as she was.
    I awoke slowly as the soft hand went lightly up my thigh. We had made love twice already, but the erection was immediate. The lady in bed with me was profiting from my years of abstinence.
    “That’s better,” the lady murmured. “That’s much better. Don’t do anything for the moment. Just lie back. Don’t move.”
    I lay back. The expert hands, the soft lips, and lascivious tongue made remaining motionless exquisite torture. The lady was very serious, ritualistic almost, in her pleasures, and was not to be hurried. When we had come into her bedroom at midnight, she had made me lie down and had undressed me slowly. The last woman who had undressed me had been my mother, when I was five, and I had the measles.
    It was not the way I had expected the evening to end. The cocktail party in the nice Colonial house in Georgetown had been polite and sober. I had arrived early and had been taken upstairs to admire the Hale children. Before the other guests came, I had chatted desultorily with Hale’s wife, Vivian, whom I had never met. She was a pretty, blondish woman with an overworked look about her. It turned out that through the years Hale had told her quite a bit about me. “After Washington,” Mrs. Hale had said, “Jerry said you were like a breath of fresh air. He said he loved skiing with you and your girl—Pat—am I right, was that her name?”
    “Yes.”
    “He said—and I hope you won’t think it’s condescending—he said that both of you were so transparently decent.”
    “That’s not condescending,” I said.
    “He was worried about you when he found out that you weren’t, well—together—anymore. And that you’d just vanished.” Mrs. Hale’s eyes searched my face, looking for a reaction, an answer to her unspoken question.
    “I knew where I was,” I said.
    “If I hadn’t met Jerry,” Mrs. Hale said, candor making her seem suddenly youthful, “I’d have nothing. Nothing.” The doorbell rang. “Oh, dear,” she said, “here comes the herd. I do hope we’ll see a lot of you while you’re here. …”
    The rest of the party had been something of a blur, although not because of drink. I never drank much. But the names had been flung at me in such quick succession, Senator So-and-So, Congressman This, Congressman That, His Excellency, the Ambassador of What Country, Mr. Blank, he works for The Washington Post , Mrs. Whoever, she’s ever so important at Justice, and the conversation had been about people who were powerful, famous, despicable, conniving, eloquent, on the way to Russia, introducing a bill that would make your hair stand on end.
    Even though I knew next to nothing about the social structure of the capital, I could tell that there was a lot of power assembled in the room. By Washington standards everybody there was more important than the host, who, while obviously on the way up, was still somewhere in the middle ranks of the Foreign Service, and who couldn’t have afforded many parties like this on his salary. But Vivian Hale was the daughter of a man who had been a