He ignored her surprise and stood up to kick off his shoes. "I hate clothes," he said. "Just hate them. That my beer? Good."
He drank from the can, then put it on the desk, and peeled off his tee shirt.
The secretary noticed that his skin was pale with reddish blotches, the kind of skin she would have expected an out-of-shape, overweight, forty-five-year-old to have.
She stood fascinated, watching, unmoving, but when Lippincott opened his belt and began to unzip his trouser fly, she turned and walked quickly from the office.
At her desk, she consulted her appointment book and had a problem. A vice president of Chase Manhattan bank was due for a meeting at 3:15. How could she make sure that her boss was wearing clothes for the meeting?
She thought about it until 3:10, then took a deep breath, summoned up her courage and walked back into his office. She stopped in disbelief inside the door. Lippincott was lying on the couch, naked, squirming as if the smooth polished fabric of the sofa irritated his skin.
He saw her in the doorway.
"Hi," he said with a wave. "Come on in."
She stood resolutely still, averting her eyes. "Mr. Lippincott, you've got a meeting with Chase Manhattan in five minutes."
"Good. I'm here."
"Err, I don't think you can hold that meeting without clothes, Mr. Lippincott."
He looked down at his naked body as if noticing it for the first time. "Suppose you're right," he said.
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"God, I hate clothes. Maybe I could wear a sheet. Tell them I just came from a toga party. Think that'll work? Can you find me a sheet?"
He looked at her hopefully. She shook her head no. He sighed in resignation.
"No, I suppose you're right. Okay. I'll get dressed."
When the man from Chase Manhattan arrived a few minutes later, she called Lippincott from the outside office and asked him pointedly, "Are you ready for the meeting, sir?"
"Of course," he said. "Oh. Oh. I see. You mean, do I have my clothes on? Sure, I do. Send him in."
The secretary escorted the guest inside.
Lippincott was sitting behind his desk. He was in his shirt sleeves and not wearing a tie. Normally over-polite, this time Lippincott did not rise to greet his guest, but merely waved him to a chair. With a sinking horror, Janie glanced over to a corner of the office. On the floor there, she saw Lippincott's jacket and tie, his tee shirt and undershorts, his shoes and socks. He was sitting behind his desk wearing only shirt and trousers. In bare feet. She wanted to scream.
"Will there be anything else, sir?" she forced herself to ask.
"No, no, Janie. Everything's okay," Lippincott said. As she left the office, he called after her. "Don't go home without talking to me first," he said.
The meeting lasted for two hours, because there was a shopping list of business to be concluded between the two banking empires. The man from Chase Manhattan knew he had to ignore the way the usually-impeccable Lippincott was dressed and re-
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mind himself he was in a cage with a financial tiger.
But he soon realized that on this day Lippincott was a toothless tiger. He seemed agreeable to anything Chase Manhattan wanted.
"Would you steer me wrong?" he kept asking, with an insouciant smile and the man, who would steer his mother into crystal radio stocks, was forced to shake his head. "No, no. Not me." It was like taking candy from a baby.
Randall Lippincott kept checking his watch, which he had taken off and placed in front of him on his brown desk blotter. He rubbed his bare wrist as if the feeling of the watch pained him.
The man from Chase Manhattan left.
In the outer office, Janie Wanamaker had been sitting quietly since 4:30, ready to leave. The other secretary had already gone for the night with a look of compassionate condolence at the one who had to stay. Janie fixed her lipstick for the fourth time and her eye shadow for the third.
It wasn't like Randall Lippincott to work late or to ask his secretary to work late. In fact, he was so undemanding on his secretaries that Janie had thought she had been hired for her bustline or her long legs, but when six months had gone by without Lippin-cott's making a pass at her, she decided she was wrong.
As the man from Chase Manhattan left, he told Janie: "Mr. Lippincott wants to see you now."
She went inside fearing the worst. Perhaps he had stripped naked again. There was his brother's suicide in Tokyo. Maybe the Lippincotts had a streak of family insanity running through all of them that manifested itself all at once in midlif e.
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But Lippincott was still sitting behind his desk hi his shirt sleeves.
He smiled at Janie when she came in and the smile was so broad that she tilted a little more toward the insanity theory.
"Janie," Lippincott said, then paused. "I don't quite know how to say this."
Janie didn't quite know how to respond so she waited silently for Lippincott to continue.
"Errr," he said, "are you doing anything tonight? Before you say anything, I just want you to know that I'm not making a pass or anything but I just feel like going out and I'd like somebody to go out with."
He looked at her hopefully.
"Well, I . . ."
"Anyplace you'd like to go," he said. "Dinner. Dancing. Disco duck dancing, is that what they call it? That's where I'd like to go."
The truth was that Janie Wanamaker had no date that night and an evening out with Randall Lippincott didn't sound half bad.
"Well, I . . ." she started again.
"Good," he said. "What place would you like to go?"
She thought immediately of the latest New York in disco, a place whose management was so rude that its attraction for New Yorkers was total. Each night, the disco attracted hundreds more people than it could hold, but there were some reservations that they had to honor. Randall Lippincott was one.
"I'll go out to my desk and make reservations," Janie said. "Meanwhile, perhaps you can get your clothes on?" she asked hopefully. She telephoned and felt the exhilarating glow of
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power as she made reservations for Randall Lippin-cott and Miss Janie Wanamaker. Six times she had stood outside that same disco on cold nights hoping to be chosen for admittance and six times she had been ignored. Tonight would.be different. Tonight was her turn to be haughty and patronizing.