The first clitoral caresses that Tanya's father rendered to her hot pussy felt far better than those of any of the other men who had made love to her. Sudden spurts of rapture spurted outward from her genitals to set her whole body aflame.
Sudden, long-sought suffusion flooded her insides as the reaction overwhelmed her. Blindly, she clutched at her father's ample cock, pulling and tugging at the firm, full, flawless muscle, until they were sixty-nining away with their lips and tongues busy, sucking and eating. They began to rock and buck and roll from side to side in a succession of rapturous frenzies-intense orgasms were on the way any moment.
CHAPTER ONE
Tanya's lovely body shivered in the night chill. She looked up at the still sky above the city, and felt so alone. It was as if there wasn't another soul in the entire world, that THE bomb had been dropped and she was the only human left on earth.
A bomb. She smiled at that. Maybe she had been watching too many cheap sci-fi movies on the idiot box.
Tanya stood alone on the flat rooftop rectangle that extended from Phil Barrett's bedroom window. The hour lay close to false dawn, but the city was still softly shrouded in early March mist. She felt sharp roof gravel beneath her bare feet, the chill of the New York winter night on the thin crust of erotic sweat that overlay her skin.
Save for the satin-lined mouton stole that covered her shoulders and breasts and the live cigarette burning close to her fingers, Tanya was naked, She thought, I must have flipped ... I must have flipped my fucking wig!
Her mental use of the word fucking in casual consideration of what had been anything but a casual act of love made Tanya laugh softly to herself ... but laughter broke quickly under the shattering impact of what had occurred, mere minutes before, in the bedroom behind her.
Nothing in her experience, certainly not in her previous bed sessions with Phil Barrett, had prepared Tanya for what had just happened to her.
Their lovemaking had begun as before ... amiably, lightly, with confidence of pleasure to come. They had taken a taxi after closing The Dry Martini, where Phil played and sang at the piano bar, had embraced on the way down town to his apartment on the east face of Murray Hill. They had walked upstairs, decided they had had enough to drink for the night, moved to the bedroom and undressed.
With bodies, lips and tongues locked, they had fallen atop the bed and he had slid into her without manual aid ... this ease of union had been one of the elements Tanya most enjoyed with Phil from their first encounter, almost a year earlier.
They lay still at first, on their sides, kissing softly, savoring the fact of their union ... but then, without warning, Tanya had exploded, her entire body consumed with a sudden rage of rapture she could no more endure than she could allow to escape her.
From her first fumbling adolescent kiss, Tanya had found pleasure in sex ... but never before in her twenty-one years had she felt herself possessed, obsessed, utterly overwhelmed by her body's inexorable voluptuous demands. She had drained him quickly, cried aloud in frantic frustration as she felt him subside, clasped him tightly within the cage of her limbs, rocking him furiously until she felt his revival within her, had then gone on to have her way with him until at last she drained him again.
Even now, long minutes later, as she stood near naked on the sharp rooftop gravel, her body resented the fact of his quick release in slumber. Her body ached to go back, her lips to kiss him to life, her core to feel again his thrust at the gates of her womb.
But not her mind, not her emotions. They clamored insistent alarms ... for the man who had turned Tanya on fully for the first time in her life was not Phil Barrett, good entertainer, good lover, good friend. It was not Phil upon whom she had spent her frenzy ... and the vision of the other, of the man who was not there, the man who could never be there, in her arms, in her body, was the source of the terror that held her tight.
Tanya shivered, flipped the stub of her cigarette over the edge of the rooftop, followed the downward arc of its glowing tip until it vanished in the mist below. She wondered who in hell she was, what in hell she was becoming.
It had been three days, plus a few hours, since her mother, Ellen, dropped the bomb. Like a refrain, it ran through her mind...."When Ellen dropped the bomb, when Ellen dropped the bomb, when Ellen dropped the bomb...."
Why, oh why, did she have to clown idiotically whenever the going grew serious?
"A good question," she told herself mockingly. "I'm glad you asked that ... "
It had been quite a bomb Ellen dropped, lying there in the sterile rectangular uterus of the Flushing hospital room, waiting to be wheeled away to the operation from which she was given one chance in a thousand of making it back.
At first Tanya thought Ellen had to be putting them on ... announcing that Larry Trowbridge was not her father, that the man who had actually given her life twenty-one years ago was a then unknown young pop singer named Alan Clark.
I mean, she thought, pushing a foot down hard on the rooftop gravel to let the pain of the sharp pebbles inform her she was still real. I mean, it's too fucking far out.
But then, at the hospital, she had remembered that Ellen never put anyone on. She was meat and potatoes ... no, make that, "And again she ordered chicken salad," from the old Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Bookshelf ads Tanya had giggled over in the bound copies of old magazines in the library of one of the many boarding schools she had briefly attended, before one of Larry Trowbridge's endless series of unsuccessful deals blew apart.
... chicken salad covered with sugared whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top : ... but definitely not a put-on type ... not ever that Tanya could remember.
Her next thought was that her mother had gone dotty from the strain of her impending operation, or from something the hospital had given her ... but then she had spotted the tight little quarter-smile at the corners of Ellen's lipsticked mouth, caught the glitter of triumphant malice in the ice blue eyes half hidden by golden lashes.
Mother had meant it, meant it that T. Lawrence Trowbridge was not her father, that Alan Clark was.
Larry hadn't said anything. He had looked as dazed as Tanya felt. Her grandmother, Dorcas, had risen to the bait, and there had been a real ding-dong right there in the hospital room until the nurse and a couple of interns moved on-scene to wheel Ellen away to the operating room.
Dorcas had stayed grimly at the hospital, while Tanya and her father ... or was Larry her father?
... drove slowly under a damp snow storm toward home in the late afternoon.
But there was no escape. Mere blocks from the hospital, Larry had braked suddenly. The Bentley, elegant, extravagant, a trifle threadbare like its driver, had performed nobly, avoiding an almost certain crash. But the jolt had started the dashboard radio, stone-cold dead for more than a year....
... and there was Alan Clark, right in the middle of the hit song from his new movie. There was no mistaking the warm husky intimately sensual tone, the jazz base of the phrasing, the sudden lift that could make a sagging melody take wing, the over-all ease and assurance that had put Alan Clark on top of the entertainment world and maintained him there for more than fifteen years.
Tanya had mooned off, trying to conceive that this total stranger had helped to conceive her. When she came out of it, Larry had parked the Bentley outside a modest neighborhood saloon and was saying, "Would you mind turning that damned thing off?"
They had gone into the saloon and sat there quietly, drinking. When Tanya tried to comfort him by suggesting Ellen might have been putting them on, he said, "Not your mother, hon, not your dear sweet mother. Besides, Alan Clark was singing at the lake that summer a couple of months before I got there. I remember it now ... and you were a seven months baby...."
... things she hadn't known till now.
Then the television over the bar had come on, and there he was, in home-screen technicolor and vista vision, close up, singing the same silly song ... I've got a little girl, I've got a little girl, I've got my living doll, I'm going to give her a whirl ... his tough-sensitive, amazingly youthful face filling the whole 25-inch screen.
They had fled the saloon in the Bentley to discover there was to be no escape from the Alan Clark curse Ellen had put upon them. While they waited at the first red light to stop them, a sound truck had driven slowly across their front, plastered with three sheets for Alan's new film, his face leering at them larger than life through the snowflakes, the loudspeaker distorting his celebrated baritone as it blared, I've got a little girl, I've got a little girl.
The Bentley had lurched forward as the light turned green, then stalled. Alarmed, Tanya had turned toward Larry to find him crumpled over the wheel, dead as mutton, dead as a herring, dead as a mackerel, dead as any and every kind of dead fish in the world.
A wildly confused hour later, when she finally got back to the hospital, Tanya learned that her mother had miraculously and triumphantly survived her thousand-to-one-shot operation, was almost certainly going to live...."Non-malignant after all," was the verdict. As if they knew!
Tanya and Grandmother Dorcas had buried T. Lawrence Trowbridge only that afternoon and Tanya had come to New York to get laid. At a time like this, sex could only be therapeutic ... all the books they had stuffed her with at sundry and various schools said so.
Besides, she had wanted to get laid ... it had 11 been almost six weeks and her body was clamoring for fulfillment and release. So she had called Phil and taken the train in from Flushing and picked him up at The Dry Martini and sat on the bench with him and sung songs with him until it was time to go beddy-bye.
They had taken the cab down to Murray Hill and come upstairs to his place and gone into the bedroom and undressed and gone to bed together ... and then it had happened.
Standing on the fog-shrouded rooftop, Tanya shivered more violently. The chill of the night, so welcome to her overheated flesh, had begun to turn ugly and cold. She decided she had better get back inside before she caught pneumonia or something worse, like the common cold.
Why, she wondered, why did she have to think in sick jokes when she was scared?
She turned and began to pick her way over the gravel toward the French window behind her. Like the cold air, the gravel was ugly, and hurt, where earlier its sharpness had heightened her awareness of a self she suddenly seemed to have lost when Ellen dropped the bomb.
Oh, she was still Tanya Trowbridge ... perhaps too much so. She was still too vulnerable, still too easily hurt ... a Tanya Trowbridge who gave her hurt away to anyone with insight to look beneath the gallows humor.
With her hand on the doorknob, she hesitated. Was mere physical discomfort driving her back into Phil Barrett's bedroom? Or was it the insatiable sex hunger so newly awakened within her, demanding a return to the madness that had so frightened her? Or was it the psychic terror, simultaneously aroused, that was demanding she undertake a repeat performance, to discover whether the nightmare were a one-time thing or something she was going to have to learn to live with, perhaps for always?
Had she really flipped? Was she going to have to turn herself in on a psychiatrist's couch? Come what might, she had to know. She had sought Phil's bed for release and comfort, not for further chain reaction to the bomb Ellen had dropped, the drom Ellen had bopped, and who in hell gave a flying fuck in hell what a panoe was anyway...?
Her lips were tightly compressed as she pushed open the French window and stepped back inside.
The warmth of the bedroom enveloped her like an electric blanket and she let the stole slip from her shoulders to the carpet as she approached the tumbled bed. Her face softened while she looked down at her lover, revealed by the rose-shaded lamp on the bedside table. Neither he nor she demanded darkness to unlock their inhibitions.
Phil lay on his back, snoring gently, one arm curled around his dark-blond head, the other against his side. One leg lay straight, the other bent slightly at the knee. Tanya sat on the bed, regarding his genitalia with amused disbelief. That little thing? she thought. That little thing?
She smiled in an aura of Chanel No. 5 and bent to kiss it, to bring it back to life. It tasted faintly of salt and semen.
She drew on it once, twice, three times, felt a stir of unbearable excitement as it miraculously began to grow. Her increased exertions in the hothouse hot room caused her body to grow slick with sweat, caused her nostrils to scent the sharp sexually stimulating smell of her own intimate perspiration.
Love sweat, she thought.
As Phil's penis grew, Tanya trembled in anticipation and slowly withdrew her lips ... but his hands gripped her shoulder-length dark-brown hair, refused to let her lift her head. She struggled to free herself, but his grip was inexorable. As if from a long way off, she heard him say, "You started it, darling ... so finish it!"
Then he was no longer holding her down and her lips were free and he was pulling her to him and gripping her breasts and lunging upward ... and once again the insane reaction overcame her as she felt him penetrate deep within her.
With a sobbing moan, she abandoned herself, flung herself flat down upon him, seeking his lips, his tongue, avidly with her own, in complete abandonment to rapture ... and to terror.
For the man she was so fervently embracing was not Phil Barrett at all ... Phil Barrett had vanished, this time as before, had merged into someone else. The man Tanya was fucking was the man she had learned only four days before was her father.
And in her mind's eye, her father's cock slithered thickly, divinely until her warm pussy embraced all of it, tightly milking it, urging, squeezing the cream to flow from him and hotly into her. His balls rubbed into the crack of her buttocks, the hair tickling her, exciting her into frantic moans.
She locked her hands behind her knees, bending her body almost in half. She pulled down with her arms and her body rolled up, her quivering pussy almost in her face. She could see her father driving into her, pushing open the vaginal lips, see them puff out damp and hot on his outstroke, plunge in, spongy and wet on his instroke, in a shattering fantasy-reality combination that let her mind see masses of beautiful colors, stars shooting, falling in arcs from the sky. Her thighs rippled and quivered as she came and she groaned a groan from deep within herself, holding the beauty of the moment ... drinking in the forbidden incest dream. Her loins lurched out of control, and it was like being touched by an electric wire ... a wire that lit up her body, lit up the whole world. She was climaxing again with just the warmth of his flesh touching hers. Waves of orgasmic pleasure, again and again, plunging together, she and her father, his tool reaching into the innermost depths of her nakedly churning body. Her entire body singing with sensual pleasure feeling the orgasms right down to her toenails and in the tip-ends of every hair on her body.
"Oh, Daddy, SING TO ME!" she screamed, and was brought instantly back to reality.
CHAPTER TWO
The next afternoon, Tanya took a cab back to Flushing. With more than enough of her own cash to pay the fare, plus a cashier's check for $7843.36 folded away in the "secret" pocket of her handbag, she felt able to afford the extravagance ... nor was she in any mood to endure needlessly the delays and uncertainties of the Long Island Railroad or the clangor and metallic stink of the I.R.T.
Beyond a sensation of sand in her pores, Tanya did not feel tired ... although she had enjoyed little enough sleep during the night just past. Four more times, the last well after full daylight, she had roused Phil to renewed potency ... and four more times the horrifying illusion that she was em bracing Alan Clark rather than Phil had possessed her.
Each time, the effect had been shattering ... yet once it was ended and sanity restored, she had been unable to resist a return bout. It reminded her of an aching tooth into which one cannot resist thrusting one's tongue, even though quite well aware that it is going to hurt like hell.
Late in the morning, there had been a session in the luxuriously chaste law office of Mr. Harley Little of Little, Fersen, O'Connor and Linz on the forty-third floor of a mid-Manhattan skyscraper. This was the firm that, on behalf of her paternal grandmother, Margaret Thompson Trowbridge, was in charge of her later "father's" estate.
Mr. Little had informed her, courteously but coldly, that Mrs. Trowbridge intended to continue paying to her mother the $500-per-month spendthrift trust income that had maintained her son and his family in raffish genteel-poverty throughout Tanya's twenty-one years.
Almost as an afterthought, Mr. Little had mentioned a codicil by which Larry Trowbridge's daughter was granted outright a small paid-up life insurance policy that had been a godfather's christening gift. The attorney had discussed investing the sum in an annuity that would give her an income until she died. He had cited tax benefits from such an investment, with a life expectancy of at least fifty years.
When he paused, Tanya asked, "How much?" And, when she learned the income would at most be around $600 a year, had added, "No thank you, I'll take the cash."
Hence the cashier's check in her "secret" pocket and the cab ride to Flushing. She lay back against the hard seat cushion, thinking about Larry, mentally saying, "Bless you, Larry! You didn't forget me after all."
She had always adored Larry, more so than ever just then. She supposed he was too recently gone for her to miss him ... in fact, Tanya wondered if she would ever feel grief for him or would continue to be warm in the memory of their mutual affection.
How were you supposed to feel? she wondered....
When she entered the rundown apartment building that had been the home of the T. Lawrence Trowbridge family for the past three years, she stepped over a pair of discarded roller skates and pushed aside a child's velocipede in the dim hallway ... but could not evade the depressing odors of stale cabbage and gefilte fish that pervaded the building.
For once, they didn't bother her. As she rode the battered elevator to the third floor, she thought with an up rush of exultation that permitted her to breathe deeply despite the effluvium of the tired building, I'm free of it now ... free of this place and these people and this half-assed existence and Ellen and ... thanks, Larry, wherever you are, darling. Thanks several million!
She unlocked the door and wandered into the living room unhappily revealed in sharp focus by the dirty-yellow afternoon sunlight, looked at the once expensive, now down-at-the-heels furniture, at the tinted cabinet photographs on the butt-scarred tabletops, at the "hand-painted" oils on the walls that were horrifying revelations of her mother's taste in decor. The inevitable litter of after death added to the depressing over-all impact of the room ... cardboard cartons overflowing with meaningless documents meaninglessly preserved, piles of old clothing on the sofa, a clutter of dead pipes atop the glass-fronted bookcase.
She moved into the kitchen with its erratic pillars of unwashed pans and dishes, scouted around for the near-full bottle of supermarket Scotch that had stood on the plastic-topped dinette table when she departed for New York less than twenty-four hours before.
It stood defiantly empty now, with a half-filled newcomer beside it. She thought, Why, Dorcas, you've been a busy little bee, haven't you? She poured herself a drink, downed it neat, shuddered, decided she had better see if her Grandmother Rogers was all right ... which was, she decided, an idiotic thought, for Dorcas was always fiercely all right in any set of circumstances.
Dorcas' bedroom door was closed, but Tanya opened it and peered inside ... and froze.
Dorcas was all right, was all right, was all right, was all right....
She was lying naked on the bottom sheet of an uncovered bed, her arms and legs wrapped tightly around the body of Mr. Hickenlooper, the apartment house superintendent. Mr. Hickenlooper's rumpled jacket lay on the carpet beside the bed, but otherwise he was fully clad ... after a fashion.
His trousers had been pushed far down on his razor-thin shanks, his shirt up under his shoulders like a faded blue bolero jacket. In between, his string-bean physique lay totally exposed. Tanya could see the matching holes in the soles of his worn tennis shoes, their toes digging into the sheet and mattress beneath.
It was the second time in her life that Tanya had encountered such a scene. The first had occurred when she arrived home from one of the several boarding schools in which she had been placed and from which she had been dropped when Larry could no longer keep up the tuition payments.
The headmistress, herself a lady of fallen fortunes, had been nice enough, had said before packing her off on a bus, "I hate to do this, Tanya ... you're one of our most promising girls ... but I simply cannot afford to run Huntley Hall as a charitable institution. I've kept you on here as long as I could, heaven knows...."
So she had arrived home, full of humiliation and a sense of betrayal ... to find Ellen busily screwing one of her long succession of "charming men" on the living room sofa. In her horror and confusion, she had cried out, "Mother!" Ellen, disentangling herself from her lover, had slapped Tanya ... the only time she had ever slapped her.
There had been a series of bitter battles over the incident between Larry and Ellen ... she had overheard Larry say angrily, "Why didn't you send the money to Tanya's school as you promised?" ... and her mother replied, "But, Larry, I couldn't resist that Persian lamb on sale at Gimbels."
It had been a most unpleasant bouillabaisse for everyone until Larry somehow scraped together enough cash to get her into another school to finish out her year. When she returned in June, the incident had been buried, and the following year Tanya had gone to the local high school.
This time, she thought, At least I'm not going to make any noise.
But before she could slip away, Dorcas' bright henna-tendrilled head turned her way. She saw Tanya standing there and, without a trace of embarrassment or losing a beat in the frenetic rhythm of her lovemaking, remarked, "Oh, hi, hon. Maybe you'd better wait in the other room." Mr. Hickenlooper's body went rigid. Tanya closed the door abruptly, fled to her own bedroom and fell backward on her own neatly adjusted blue tufted candlewick spread, laughing hysterically.
There had been elements of irresistible farce in the unexpected episode. Tanya thought, Why, Grandmother, what big tits you have! And what big eyes! And what a big....
Before she could carry it further, she heard the door of Dorcas' bedroom pushed violently open, Mr. Hickenlooper's outraged voice crying, "But God dammit, I'm shot down!" Then the heavy fast beat of his retreating footsteps, then the slam of the front door behind him.
Minutes later, clad in a bright blue coolie coat, Dorcas entered Tanya's bedroom, smoking a cigarillo. She opened her tiny mouth to speak, saw Tanya rolling on the bed, holding her belly to keep from bursting, suddenly began laughing and flung herself on the bed beside her granddaughter.
When Tanya could speak, she gasped, "I do hope I didn't interrupt anything, Dorcas darling!" Then they were off again in renewed spasms of uncontrollable mirth.
Finally, Dorcas said, her eyes still wet with tears, "If you dare pull any of that 'do you think at your age it is right?', all I can tell you is that as long as I can, I'm going to."
"Now I know what Ellen means when she says you're impossible," gasped Tanya. "After all ... Mr. Hickenlooper!"
"Honey," said Dorcas, "when you get to be my age, you're perfectly happy to settle for whatever's at hand. As a matter-of-fact, I've had worse. And old Needlenose Hickenlooper has been giving me the hot eye ever since I got here."
"What makes you think I got laid last night?" said Tanya. As always with Dorcas, she found herself getting earthier than usual. She wondered if any other girl, anywhere, had such a grandmother as Dorcas Rogers.
Dorcas snapped, "Oh, be your age ... and remember, I was your age once. In fact, I was your age about six years if I remember rightly. I don't know about you, I need a drink. Coitus interruptus always leaves my nerves on edge."
"I'm sorry," said Tanya, following her meekly to the kitchen.
"Shit, it wasn't your fault," said Dorcas magnanimously. As she lifted the bottle to her lips, her coolie coat fell open. From the neck down, Dorcas looked like a woman of thirty or less. From the neck up ... well, nature and artifice had been kind, but not that kind.
"One thing you kids can be thankful you missed," said Dorcas, passing the bottle after carefully wiping the rim on the heel of a hand.
"What's that?"
"You never had to do it in a rumble seat. Back in my youth, the parsons used , to damn it as a symbol of sin ... but if the angels ever contrived a device to make sinning impossible, they achieved it when they made the rumble seat. Christ, there just wasn't room!"
Tanya helped herself, put down the bottle between them, said, "Did you ever make it?"
"Just once," said Dorcas. "With a jockey. And even then the front edge left a cut across my back that took two weeks to heal."
"How's Ellen?" Tanya asked.
"Being a bitch ... so she must be getting better. How did your appointment with the lawyers go?" Tanya told her, showed her the check, added, "If you tell Ellen about this, I swear I'll crucify you."
"Forget it, hon," said Dorcas. "What's your next move?"
"I'm splitting," said Tanya. "That's all I know now. Don't worry ... I can get a job anywhere and earn a living when the money runs out."
"I'm not worried," said Dorcas thoughtfully. "But you are. What's bugging you, baby?"
"I guess it's that ... oh, hell, that damned bomb Ellen dropped just before her operation. I'd like to know who in hell I am, that's all."
Dorcas regarded her steadily for a long moment, then said, "I guess you've got a right to know if anyone has."
"You mean you've found something?"
The older woman nodded. "I did some rummaging last night. Come on ... I'll show you. I found something, all right."
"Something" was a single age-yellowed letter dated more than twenty-one years earlier. It was from Alan Clark to Ellen Rogers, and it was justifiably bitter. The final sentences read....
... and I don't give a damn who you've married-oh, don't worry, I won't interfere, you can bet on that-but that baby is really ours, yours and mine, and don't you forget it. I wish you better luck with your society playboy husband than I've had with you, if only for the sake of the kid.
Unhappily, Alan
Dorcas said, "I only hope I've done right ... letting you see this."
Quietly, Tanya put it in the pocket of her handbag, alongside the check. She said, "I'm keeping it, Dorcas. I may need it sometime."
"You're going to look him up?"
"I'm going to try."
"When did you decide this?" Dorcas asked, reaching again for the bottle.
"Just now ... when I read the letter." Tanya realized it was true. At least, now, she knew who she was, who her father actually was. And she had to go to him, to talk to him, to let him know who she was ... not that she wanted anything out of him but private acknowledgement and recognition. If she didn't ... she thought of last night with a shudder ... she had an idea that she was a very sick girl.
She said, "Thanks, Dorcas. You've done more than you know for me."
"I only hope it wasn't to you," said a palpably worried Dorcas. "I've always felt you were the only nice thing that's happened to this family in five generations. Remember, honey, if you get jammed up and can't see your way out, call on Dorcas. She'll come a running, and she's survived some jams you wouldn't believe."
"Oh, I'd believe!" said Tanya. All at once she felt tears welling up in her eyes and an irresistible thickness in her throat. She said, "Oh, shit!" and began to cry.
Her grandmother cuddled her although the hennaed head came barely to Tanya's chin. Dorcas said, "You don't have to get that sloppy, honey."
"It's not that," gasped Tanya. "It's just that when I think of the lousy deal poor Larry got from Ellen I break up. He never got a decent deal from any woman."
"Except you, honey," said Dorcas. "Except you."
"But I couldn't help him ... you know, in bed."
They both cried a little, and then Dorcas said, "Are you going to be around long, Tanya?"
Tanya shook her head. "As soon as I bathe and change and pack a few things, I'm on my way."
"You're not going to see her?"
"Not now ... especially not now," said Tanya. "If I saw Ellen right now, I'd be tempted to pull all her sutures out."
"You're probably right," Dorcas sighed, reached for the bottle again, added, "Remember, Ellen is your mother...."
When Phil Barrett opened his apartment door in answer to Tanya's ring early that evening, his eyes went wide with surprise as he saw the suitcase and overnight bag at her feet. He said, "When you called, you didn't tell me you were moving in."
"It's just for tonight, you fool," she told him. "I've split out from home, and I haven't decided where I'm going to take root. Feel better?"
"Have you stopped beating your wife?" He carried her bags inside, put them against one of the bedroom walls. He was wearing his working clothes ... a plaid dinner jacket with narrow black shawl lapels, a plaid tie, a ruffled shirt, black cummerbund and narrow black seamless trousers. Tanya thought, as always, that he looked very attractive in an almost fragile, sensitive way that was belied by the bedroom stamina she knew so well.
He said, "Dinner, darling?"
"Why not? It's on me." She made her tone deliberately light and bright, maintained it thus throughout the evening lest she reveal the extreme nervousness she felt. She had drawn a check before leaving Flushing that all but demolished her savings account and had plenty of cash ... as well as the cashier's check in her bag.
They dined sumptuously at the Barclay and walked the few blocks to The Dry Martini, where they romped through the evening as much as they had the night before. Then they taxied down to Phil's pad and once again undressed and embraced, naked, before fusing their bodies on the bed.
Perhaps, now that I really know Alan Clark is my father, she thought, it won't happen again.
But it did, and if anything the incestuous image that gripped her was clearer, sharper, more deeply devouring and devastating ... and the pleasure greater still. They exhausted one another and still the holed tooth demanded filling ... until at last he slept and she could no longer rouse him.
"Jesus, baby, you look like hell," he told her over the kitchenette coffee and delicatessen Danish late the next morning.
"You don't exactly look like the fresh laid egg you are," she replied. "Still want me to move out?"
He moaned, rolled bloodshot eyes, ran long fingers through his dark-blond hair, said, "Honey, I think I love you, but you'd kill me in a week."
"What a way to go!" she mocked. Then, "Alan Clark's in town, isn't he?"
"So what? How does that particular great one enter our oversexed little universe?"
"Maybe I'll tell you ... someday," she replied. "Right now, all I want to know is where he's staying."
"How would I know that? Clark's no buddy of mine. He's way up there ... I'm way down here."
"But you can find out."
"Why should I?"
"Because, if you don't, I'm going to rape you right here and now."
"In the kitchenette?" He looked alarmed. "How?"
"I'll find a way," she promised, making a move toward him, and letting her robe fall open.
He spilled out of his chair and fled to the telephone, called somebody named Sid. Tanya leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette and listening until he hung up. Then she said, "Thanks, darling." She put out her smoke and moved toward him, trapped him against the wall, rotating her pelvis against his, laughing softly as she felt his reluctant but undeniable response.
"You're going to kill me," he groaned but he made no move to push her away.
"Because you've been sweet, you don't have to do it in the kitchenette," she said, thrusting more firmly against him. "Let's try the living room sofa instead."
The terrifying irresistible voluptuous game was on once more, and so overwhelming was the illusion of incest that this time she actually cried out in sheer panic as it took over ... but her alarm faded before the intensity of sensation that flooded her from scalp to soles.
Late that afternoon, she moved into a forty dollar-a-day single in Eastside Plaza Towers ... just two floors beneath the penthouse where Alan Clark was staying during his New York visit.
CHAPTER THREE
Alan Clark stood under the shower adjoining the little dressing room that, in turn, adjoined the big recording studio beyond its walls. He gave his body a quick burst of hot water to wash away the rehearsal sweat, then turned the cold on full to restore vigor to his fatigue-burdened body.
He shuddered at its icy impact, felt a too familiar lightning flash emanating from the base of his skull as he tilted his head back to let the hard needle spray sting his face. Too damned much sex! he thought, recognizing the symptom from long experience.
He turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, reached for a towel. There seemed to be a layer of cellophane between his skin and everything that touched it, an invisible suit of armor that only the sharpness of the shower could pierce.
Sitting naked and still half-damp on the dressing room couch, he felt bushed, tired, fatigued, spent, pooped to the marrow, to every nerve-end ... this trip to New York had been murder every moment of the way. Momentarily, he wondered why in hell he had ever agreed to undertake it ... his pictures had long since attained a box-office level that varied little with their relative merits. Over the past several years, public relations trips and personal appearances had been proven to make little difference in the gross receipts.
He halted that train of thought wryly ... he knew damned well why he had come east. He wanted the lead in the film version of Metropole, the Irra Naismith musical what-is-it that had been packing them in at the St. James Theater since last October ... and he couldn't afford to look eager.
Therefore, he had to look busy ... hence the trip, ostensibly to boost his current release.
As he slowly finished toweling himself off, Alan began humming the verse of ' 'The Devil Is Afraid of Music," the all but forgotten Willard Robison standard he was reviving for the album he was even then recording. In previous run-throughs in the big studio beyond the wall, he had not got it quite to his own satisfaction ... and, in music as in women, Alan Clark was a perfectionist.
It was, with a certain highly sexy timbre in his voice, the basis of his long-lived success as a top pop balladeer.
He sensed a grip on the phrasing that had thus far eluded him, stopped humming, went over it again, heaved a sigh of relief, went through it a third time, singing the lyric as well ... at last he had it right. It was thick, funky, with the emphasis exactly where it belonged.
Alan knew ... he should know ... lord, how he should know!
As he dressed, he wished he was one of the singers who needed sex before a performance to loosen up ... glancing at the couch, he smiled faintly, surmising that a full four fifths of the singers, musicians and technicians awaiting his return beyond the wall took it for granted that he was using his lone recess to get laid.
So many singers, male and female, from grand opera to the lower orders of burlesque, demanded sex to loosen up their vocal chords before performing ... but the half-dozen times Alan had tried it had been uniformly disastrous. He sang like a dead mackerel after sexual release. No matter how up-tight he was, he performed far better if he waited till after the performance.
He wondered what Lucky or Sally-Jo had lined up for him back at the hotel.
* * *
He had felt compelled to call a break in the rehearsal this afternoon after a long, nagging series of bloopers on the part of every component of the record ... from the technicians to the musicians to the bossa nova singers who were there to give the old song a fresh slant. The arrangement hinged on a special sixteen-bar solo by Alan around which the entire tape was built. He had to float his voice over the chorus with just the right jazz intonation to stamp his signature on the softer, subtler Latin accents of the singers.
As he opened his mouth to attack the stretch, his tonsils had tightened, his tongue had gone dry, his confidence had evaporated. He had called, "Cut!"
... drawing frowns from the bespectacled executives behind the glass window of the control room. He had nodded to Lucky Winsted, who was leaning indolently against a wall cleaning his fingernails with a platinum pocketknife, had told the others, "Take thirty, everybody."
He decided as he stepped on the podium that it must be about the four thousandth time he had taken stage center with literally hundreds of professionally involved people depending upon him to deliver ... and the load felt like Atlas' burden on his shoulders. Then he put his mind on the matter at hand, rapped the lectern sharply with his knuckles.
"Places everybody," he called. "From the top...." He gave them all the full grin " ... and this time let's take it all the way;"
It went off without a flaw Alan could detect ... but even so he cast a wary look at the booth, where Joe Link sat in his massiveness, a milk chocolate Buddha with a wispy goatee. Joe nodded gravely and lifted a middle finger in a goosing gesture.
Alan nodded and stepped down from the podium. Another job wrapped up ... his shirt was wringing wet beneath his jacket. The playback proved a mere formality.
As he led his entourage through the reception room toward the elevators, he was hailed by a trimly thick-set middle-aged young man, one of the most celebrated lyric tenors in the operatic world who said after they had exchanged hugs, "Alan, boy, how I wish I had your freedom!"
"Yeah?" said Alan, amused, "How I wish I had your voice!" They exchanged amiabilities, then Alan said, "What in hell are you doing out here? I saw your name on the schedule board to be recording right now."
The opera star nodded toward an adjoining glassed-in studio, in which a plump pink-faced nervous little man sat bowed over a piano keyboard, nervously massaging his knuckles.
"Guido's got the yips," he said. "He blew the same arpeggio three times, so I decided to step out here and let him cool off."
"Looks to me like he's working himself into a tizzy," said Alan. The opera singer shrugged.
"Get another boy," suggested Alan.
"He's the only man available who's worked with me before," said the singer. Worried, he added, "I don't want to blow the date but ... "
"What's his name?" Alan asked, snapping his fingers. "His last name?"
"Alfieri," said the lyric tenor. "Guido Alfieri."
"Hey!" said Alan, surprised. "He's a pretty good boy. I've got some of his concert records."
"Sure, he's good," said the singer. "I wouldn't hire him otherwise. But that temperament jazz hits us all now and then."
"You're telling me!" Alan strode to the desk, picked up a mike, pointed toward the choked-up pianist when the board girl lifted her penciled brows inquiringly.
"Alfieri!" he snapped. The pianist jumped at the sound of his name in the soundproofed studio, looked up and around, saw Alan waving at him. His eyes and mouth went as round as three berries.
"Where'd you pick that stuff up, Guido?" said Alan. "Playing with Lawrence Welk?" The man in the glass booth recognized Alan, uttered a soundless response, then began to grin. The opera singer gave Alan a clap on the shoulder.
"You son of a bitch!" he said admiringly.
"He'll be okay now," Alan told him.
He led the way on outside, where two Carey Cadillacs, put at his disposal by the studio, waited in the slush at the curb. In the car, he sank into a bottomless pit of letdown and fatigue ... and the gnawing insecurity that ate at him whenever his guard was down. Thank God, he thought, that Monday, now a mere two days away, would find him back in the blessed warmth and relative privacy of Palm Springs.
Joe Link, sitting beside him, cut into his hog wallow of self-pity with, "Jesus, man! Here I been with you, man and boy, for more than six years now ... and just when I figure you've gone robot all the way, you mess things up by turning human on me."
"Scratch a robot and you'll find a human," said Alan.
"Jokin' ... You cut a mighty fine track after you took time out ... and that was a mighty decent thing you did for that choked-up piano boy back there."
"Oh, it's fun to play God some of the time," said Alan. He was so unused to compliments from the utterly candid Joe that they embarrassed him.
The chocolate Buddha's immense black eyes regarded him probingly, thoughtfully, for a long moment. Then he said, "I guess it don't hurt to play God ... just so long as it don't become a habit."
Joe Link was one of an elite group of great jazz musicians who have fallen prey to the rock-folk-protest tidal wave and its accompanying sublimation of the amateur. While a very few, like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Easie and a handful of others, have managed to maintain or even to improve their status ... other greats, like Barney Bigard, J. C. Higginbotham and scores of still vital jazz heroes have simply vanished from the scene ... less able to get jobs than even in the depths of the Depression.
When Alan heard that Joe Link, who had not only led his own band but had played and recorded with the likes of Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Ellington and Chick Webb, was on the loose in Los Angeles and looking hungrily for work, he had snapped him up as a personal employee ... it was a symbiotic relationship, happy on the whole, for them both.
Joe had a lifetime job with a singer whose increasing musicianship he could not only respect but help to mold ... while Alan had long since begun referring to Joe as his "artistic conscience," a role that in fact Link aptly and eminently filled.
More than once, when Joe had detected Alan slipping into Tin Pan Alley phraseology or letting careless vocal habits claim him, he had called him to account and furious fights had developed between them. When he had had his say, The older man had an infuriating habit of simply walking away and burying himself in some black ghetto ... from which Alan invariably had to unearth him.
There was no question of apology. Alan's going to the trouble of digging him out and reclaiming him was explanation enough for both of them. In recent years, as their relationship mellowed and improved, such upheavals had become rare ... but thanks to Joe's unerring critical ear and Alan's insecurity-rooted arrogance, the threat, or at least the possibility, of another earthquake lurked ever below the amiably wrangle-pocked surface.
Just before they reached the Eastside Plaza, Joe said, "It's a good thing this junket's about done, boy. You're getting bigger bags than Stanley."
"When you say that, show your big white fangs ... and not in a snarl, either," said Alan. "You're too fucking old to talk about a younger man getting tired."
He thought about the insult, shuddered, added a vehement, "Jesus!"
"You take a look in the mirror when we get upstairs." The limousine was pulling slowly up in front of the private side entrance of the Eastside Plaza.
"Nobody's got bags like Stan!" said Alan. "The rumor is that he hired a plastic surgeon to build them under his eyes like a pair of bay windows."
It was a horrifying thought. Stanley Forman, Alan's personal manager, was a lean, lemon-hued, ulcerated young-old man whose most notable facial characteristic was the pair of purple pouches that had hung, one under each eye, ever since Alan first met him here in New York, almost twenty years before.
Save for considerable loss of hair, Stan had not aged noticeably in the past two decades. He was probably an old-looking baby at birth, Alan decided.
"You better turn in early with a bad girl or a good book," said Joe Link as they hit the sidewalk.
"Oh, come on, that's old as the hills! You can do better than that."
"Not right now I can't," said Joe. They were ushered through the side door of the hotel and entered the private elevator inside that took them directly to the penthouse.
On the way up Alan yawned, caught Joe's eye on him and said, "Don't be so smug, you bastard ... okay, I guess maybe you're right."
"You do what I told you. I don't want to lose no meal ticket as rich as you."
They were pummeling each other like a pair of teenagers when the elevator door slid open to reveal the white, silver and blue plush decor of the penthouse foyer.
A very pretty brunette with milk-white skin and hazel eyes stood there, evidently waiting for them. Her eyes were widely spaced, as were her breasts, and were presumably a great deal more vacant. She wore prim little light fishnet stockings, and her mouth was as tiny as an enlarged pore.
She said in tones as aggrieved as a thin little baby voice could attain, "I thought you'd never get back."
Alan put an arm around her, pulled her close and gave her a big kiss which she returned with notable non-fervor, remarking when she got her mouth free of his, "You'll muddle my lipstick."
"Screw your lipstick!" said Alan, lowering his hand to cup her tight little buttocks. "Sally-Jo baby, I'm beat. What have you got on the docket for the beddy-bye bit tonight?"
"I don't know. Lucky has something lined up."
"That blond broad one of you brought in last night tried to get emotional," said Alan, half angrily.
"That was Lucky's," said Sally-Jo.
"I don't care whose it was," warned Alan, "as long as it doesn't happen again. Sex I've got and to spare. Love I've got only so much of ... and most of that goes into the music."
"You're telling me," said Sally-Jo in an Our Gang Comedy treble.
Alan fixed her with a glower that melted into a grin as she stared guilelessly back at him. Then he said, "Oh, come on, baby ... we had ours years ago. Just wipe out my dates for this evening, except for the broad. Have her here right away. I'm gonna turn in early. "
"But, Alan...." the baby voice protested. "Have you forgotten you're singing for the Senator's banquet at the Waldorf at midnight? Oh ... and Mr. Bellows is here again. He says you have an interview."
"Oh, my God!" said Alan, looking at Joe Link, stricken. "Okay, but that God-damned writer is driving me out of my skull."
"Have a ball, boy," said Joe, turning toward the elevator.
"Hey! Don't run out on me, you rat-fink!" cried Alan, making a grab for the older man. But before he could reach him, the elevator doors slid silently shut to make a barrier between them.
CHAPTER FOUR
Regarding Gilbert Bellows over a light highball in the Eastside penthouse living room, Alan wondered how any man so round could conceivably be so square. With his balding head fringed by pale brown hair in sore need of a trim, his rimless gold bowed glasses, his rumpled tweeds, his delicately responsive features, Bellows was instantly identifiable as either a professional man of letters or a rural postmaster.
The question he had just asked was a dilly, too...."How do you think Bix Beiderbecke would have made out in the current jazz scene?"
In the course of their previous interviews, over the past ten days, Alan had managed to read Bellows pretty well as a literary chiseler who had carefully brown-nosed his way inside by hugging the rectums of cultural pioneers until he had attained his present eminence as a top feature article writer for America, the most important weekly "picture" magazine in the land.
For this assignment, Bellows had evidently boned up on the memoirs of Perry Bradford and the jazz studies of Leonard Feather and Rudi Blesh. For the past forty minutes, Alan had been coping as best he could with queries such as, "How directly do you trace the development of your style to the recordings of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith?" or, "How do you rate the Beatles as an influence on the modern pop music scene?"
Finally now, Bellows had got around to Bix.
Alan pondered the question briefly, said, "For an answer to that, Gilly, you'll have to get out your ouija board and consult him directly."
"I'm serious, Alan," Gilbert Bellows said, lifting his glass of Mexican beer.
"He'd have starved to death," Alan snapped, thinking, Boy, when aren't you serious, you crumb? "Who could hear him under all that amplified sound?"
Bellows looked pleased as he put down his glass, wiped foam from his lips with a blue bandana handkerchief and glanced at the compact portable tape recorder on the marble-topped table beside his chair. He said, "That's a very good answer, Alan. It should stir a number of hackles."
Prosy bastard! thought Alan, wondering what was coming next. Whenever Bellows paused during an interview, he had learned to gird himself for an abrupt change of front. He wished to hell Stanley Forman had not conned him into the America magazine bit ... he had seldom met anyone who could generate his instant dislike as effortlessly as Gilbert Bellows.
He sipped his drink and waited.
Other voices interrupted the silence. Lucky Winsted minced into the room, unwinding a garish crimson and gold knitted ankle-length muffler that was his sole outer protection against the chill of the late Manhattan winter. A couple of girls undulated in his wake.
Lucky, born Lucian, was a medium-tall reedy young man with the black and gold eyes of a snake and the mouth of a sensitive shark, who wore his homosexuality like a robe of honor over his tubular neo-Edwardian clothes. The girls were both post-Mod from their white boots and mini-skirts to their psychedelic-dyed bright fur chubbies, young, beautiful, alive with eagerness and excitement at meeting the king in his well-guarded lair.
Lucky introduced them as Andy and Mindy, added in answer to Alan's unspoken question, "They're Steed's New York playmates."
"Hi, kittens," said Alan, smiling at them although impatience and anger churned within him. Lucky was supposed to have been arranging a contact with Metropole producer Irra Naismith's girl Friday, to arrange a meeting between Alan and the producer before Alan took off for California Sunday evening ... a meeting that had been repeatedly deferred and was the real motivation for his having come to New York.
The girls wriggled like worms in the warmth of his smile and Alan noted with matter-of-fact appraisal that they both passed with something to spare the minimum tape measure requirements of 35-24-34. Furthermore, if they had recommendations from Steed Bonnett, his closest Hollywood work-and playmate, he could feel 'confident there would be no teary aftermaths ... as with the girl Lucky had brought him the night before.
He said, "Lucky, give the chicks what they want in the bar while I wrap things up with Gilly-boy, here."
The magazine writer stared after the girls for a long moment, then turned to Alan and said, "During the course of our sessions these past ten days, I must have seen at least a dozen young women in and out of here. Now, I've got one more question ... are they always beautiful?"
"They have to be to get in here at all," said Alan. "I mean, why bother with homely ones when there's so much beautiful packaged stuff around, willing and ready to go?"
Gilbert Bellows looked baffled. He said, frowning and picking at an upholstery button atop an arm of his chair, "But there is so much more to women than were surface beauty. What about soul, and intellect, and talent?"
"There are no bars on talent," Alan replied.
"Phyllis Diller and Judy Canova are both old bud dies ... but I wouldn't want to go to bed with either of them on a bet. Isn't that what beautiful broads are for?"
"But ... but ... it seems so shallow."
"Depends entirely on the length of the vagina," Alan snapped, mounting irritation getting the better of him briefly. "Plenty of them are deeper than you'd think."
"But it's so ... so utterly pagan!"
"Let's leave my sex life, such as it is, out of it, shall we?" said Allan.
"But we can't ... not if I'm going to give America's readers the whole picture. My God man, you act as if sex were merely another animal function, like ... like going to the john!"
"Isn't it?" said Alan. "After all, you've read your psychology books, haven't you?"
"But it denies love ... and romance," cried Bellows, his voice rising toward shrillness. "How do you sing love to them so convincingly?"
"Oh, that's easy." Alan grinned without mirth. "I simply pretend the mike is the mouth of a beautiful girl I want to get into."
"You're putting me on!"
"Am I?" Alan stood up, hoping thus to signify that the interview was at an end.
"You must be!" the writer insisted. "I'll wager you lead a thoroughly quiet life behind the swinging facade ... ah, not a bad title for the article ... a life like a lot of young bachelors who work very hard."
Mischievous impulse seized Alan. To date, he had carefully kept Bellows from any too-close looks at his private pattern ... that had been one of the conditions imposed by Stanley Forman before the interviews began. Stan had said, "If Bellows ever digs out the truth, he'll crucify us!" But Stanley, eye bags and all, was taking a plane for the coast tomorrow afternoon, leaving Saturday evening free. As much to spite his manager as to shock Bellows, Alan said, "We'll be having a little New York wrap-up party here tomorrow night. Why don't you join us and see for yourself?"
"I wouldn't miss it for the world ... may I bring a photographer?"
"Why not?" said Alan, steering him toward the elevator door. "As long as she's good-looking...."
When he entered the longish narrow chamber that served the suite as a bar, Alan discovered that one of the girls had stripped from the waist down and was engaged in doing a split on the bar top, attempting to pick up with her clitoris a half lemon slice someone had propped on edge with a quartet of maraschino cherries.
Slowly she dipped, made contact, gripped tight, rose with an acrobat's dexterity, then let out a cry of pain, plucked the fruit slice free and threw it against the wall.
"That stings!" she cried, rubbing herself.
"Why do you think I chose lemon?" countered
Lucky, smiling. He spotted Alan, said, "Hey, Coach, where's that cube writer? We put on this little show for his benefit."
"Cool it, you creep!" said Alan. "He split. Now what about Irra Naismith and that broad of his?"
"She's a dyke," said Lucky. "So what am I supposed to do with her?"
"If you don't know, who does?" Sally-Jo piped up in her Baby Jane treble.
"Pussy juice!" said Lucky. "As a matter-of-fact, she'll set it up for tomorrow afternoon, if...." He let it hang.
"If what?" snapped Alan. "Cut the clowning or I swear I'll fire you."
"You wouldn't dare!" said Lucky. "I'd ruin you, Coach!"
"What do I have to do?" Alan asked wearily. He was too tired to feel like playing fag games.
"She'll set it up if you'll take her to the banquet tonight. It seems Irra wants to get next to the Senator for devious reasons of her own."
Alan considered it, then nodded. He wanted the lead in the film version of Metropole much too badly to quibble at this point, with time getting so short. He had a major TV show to tape in Hollywood Tuesday evening and wanted ... needed ... a few hours to unwind in Palm Springs first.
"What's she like?" he asked, reaching for a bottle of rare Old London Dock brandy and beginning to mix himself a highball.
According to Lucky Winsted, Adrienne Wither spoon, Irra Naismith's right bower, was built like a box kite with barely rounded corners. Beneath her wrought-iron contralto lay a whiff of Carborundum. "And she has the cutest little mustache!" Lucky tossed it in for free.
"You're enjoying this," Alan charged.
"Immensely," said Lucky. "It's vastly reassuring to discover you're a whore, too, Coach."
"Touch'!" Alan had to smile. He sipped his drink and pondered Lucky while the others resumed their fun and games. Their relationship, on the surface implausible, was actually another working symbiosis. Capricious, shrewd, whimsical, treacherous, always amusing, Lucky Winsted was a man Alan trusted implicitly ... for the simple reason that he knew the homosexual was madly, incurably, in love with him.
Lucky made no bones about his passion, was perfectly willing to bide his time, serving as court jester the while. Furthermore, he was valuable, with the morals of an alley cat and the flair for intrigue of a latter-day Machiavelli. Even more important, he had an eidetic memory that never forgot a spoken word once heard, a written word once read, a face once seen.
He served in the Alan Clark entourage without title, surrendering his wit, his youth and his talent in return for a salary and opportunity to live in close proximity to the love of his life. Between himself and Alan there was some small degree of fondness, but of respect or true friendship not a trace.
They were different breeds of cat, stalking the same jungle, sharing the same caves ... but because they were seeking different prey their interests did not clash.
Edgy, nervous, irritable because of the uncertainty Irra Naismith's evasive tactics were causing him, Alan drank sparingly before dinner, feeling heartburn immediately around the next corner. At the table, he swallowed barely half of his petite marmite, merely picked at his chicken hash au gratin, drank milk while Lucky and the two party girls grew even merrier on champagne. Sally-Jo, as was her custom, drank quantities of bourbon on the rocks without indicating a trace of intoxication in gesture, expression or voice.
Not for the first time, Alan thought as he observed her, his "personal secretary" had not merely a hollow leg but was hollow all the way, at least from the neck down. Above that milk-white Rubicon lurked a head whose enigmatic, clouded, occasionally surprising contents, he had long since given up hope of understanding.
People everywhere were forever asking him why he kept her on his staff, since she could neither type or take shorthand and her equipment in the field of social graces was notably lacking. He had never told anyone the real reason, not even his intimates ... though he guessed Stanley Forman suspected and Lucky probably knew. Joe Link, inured to the personal aberrations of upper-case show folk, had never shown the slightest interest.
After dinner, Alan went to his bedroom, undressed and lay down, seeking a few hours of slumber before eleven, when he would have to begin preparation for his midnight date at the Senator's party, to say nothing of his date with the mustached Adrienne Witherspoon.
But sleep refused to come, despite the marrow deep fatigue that enveloped him. He thought furiously, even with a trace of panic, about his need for the lead in the filmed version of Metropole. If he didn't land this blockbuster after his last three screen outings, all of them trash, however successful at the box office, he'd be playing underdog to Steed Bonnett, who had scored a succession of smash hits in all the media of entertainment. He'd be running behind Frank and Sammy and Dino and the others, and inevitably they'd make him feel it ... and that would mean the beginning of the end of a lot of things he couldn't even bear to dream about, much less to consider wakefully.
Why in hell was Irra Naismith leading him on such a chase? Alan wondered miserably. Had the producer already described the handwriting on the wall? How did an entertainer like himself maneuver the skid into second leads and character roles, without all the loss of status and revenue such a skid implied?
He discovered that he was tense all over. Jesus, he had to relax. For that, he needed sex. And he knew, as certainly as his diaphragm was stinging with heartburn, that he was suffering from a recurrence of the psychological impotence that gripped him at times like this.
Maybe the life was getting to him after all, he thought dismally, not daring to send for the girls disporting themselves with Lucky in the bar. Much good Lucky would do them, although the skinny little devil was capable of swinging surprises when the spirit moved him.
Perhaps that square, Gilbert Bellows, had been right after all. Perhaps he was missing whatever it was women had to give, merely collecting door prizes instead of the jackpot. Perhaps if he fell in love, really in love ... but he had no desire to reopen that still suppurating psychic scar. It still hurt. Jesus, he wondered, how long had it been? Twenty years, maybe twenty-one, and it could have been the night before last.
Reluctantly, he picked up the house phone from the bedside table, had himself connected with the suite saloon, told Lucky to send in Sally-Jo.
He had no alternative, even though the thought made his sun-bronzed flesh crawl. But this was why he kept Sally-Jo on the payroll ... and why he would never dare take her off it.
Through long practice, Sally-Jo went about her ministrations as calmly and efficiently as a trained nurse ... or a veteran prostitute. While he pulled the special mattress from the closet, she undressed, folding her clothes neatly and placing them on a chair. As he lay down on the mattress, on his back, she trotted into the bathroom for towels, her tight, trim little buttocks bobbing in a fashion that reminded him of the walking beam on an old-fashioned ferry-boat.
He felt a welcome stir of life in his loins under the stimulus of her tiny mouth, said, "Now, sweetie." She straddled him adroitly, reached for him, placed him expertly. "Put it in," he told her.
Deadpan as ever, she trebled, "I'll have to tuck it in."
Somehow she made it, and he felt another stir of life, then desperation as it subsided. He said, "Do it, Sally-Jo," and she did, and he felt the flow of some of the bourbon she had imbibed during dinner around him.
As always, it did the trick, and his virility returned with the fierceness and suddenness of a rocket rising from its pad. Fulfillment was rapid, without emotion, and exercise ... but as he raced for the shower afterward, he was wholly and once again a man. With coffee, a handful of dexies and a couple of shots of brandy, he'd be quite capable of dealing with whatever the night ahead held in store for him ... even to a rectangular dyke with a cute little mustache.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was one-thirty the next afternoon when Stanley Forman swallowed the final crumb of his lunch. This consisted entirely of blueberry muffins, the latest in a long series of frantic diets undertaken in a seventeen-year effort to sooth the sporadic anguish of a chronically acid and occasionally ulcerated stomach.
He engaged in a delayed double belch, reminiscent of the one-two blasts of a twin-barreled shotgun, winced at the hot, tearing flame in his diaphragm, reached for the glass of buttermilk that composed the liquid half of his diet. When he put it down, there was a rich white lateral streak running the length of his upper lip.
Since Stanley's ravaged digestive tract did not allow him the added tension of shoptalk while he ate, he now regarded Alan across the table and said, "How'd you make out with the dyke last night?"
"Wipe off that Goddamn white mustache and I'll tell you. Jesus you look like you just went down on an albino broad with mange!"
Forman complied. In the cold lemonade afternoon sunlight, his face looked even yellower than usual, its color contrasting vividly with the large purple half-moons beneath his eyes.
"Well?" he said.
''Adrienne was a doll," Alan told him through a mouthful of deviled bones, "a living doll! She even told me she could go for me if she didn't swing the other side of the street."
"Oh, great!" moaned Stanley, still suffering. "What in hell did she want?"
"The Senator's wife ... it seems they had a thing in boarding school somewhere." He paused, added a fervent, "Je-sus!"
"You sound like you went for her," Forman accused.
"Adrienne's no pig. At least her knockers are real and her mustache isn't buttermilk."
"But she's a dyke!"
"That's always a challenge," said Alan.
"You must of got something out of her. "
"You won't like it, paisan."
"A lot of things I don't like! How in hell do you think I got this perforated duodenum?"
"I thought you spotted some clinic where they were running a sale on ulcers and suckered for a bargain," said Alan, digging into his O'Brien potatoes.
"Oh, get off, baby!" Forman's stomach rumbled mutinously. He looked nervously at his solid gold wristwatch. "My plane goes at three."
"Okay, Stan-baby, you asked for it." Alan demolished the last bit of beef on his platter, again spoke with his mouth full. "Adrienne says Irra will peddle the screen rights to Metropole for five million clams."
"You still want the part bad enough, we can get it."
"There's a snag, Stan-baby ... Irra wants to tie it up for five years. So who's gonna give us that kind of bread after the way Dave Merrick hung up Fox with Dolly? It's too fucking much, baby. I'm like thinking we'd better dig up a new property."
"Like what?"
"Jesus, how would I know? Maybe in the public domain."
Stanley Forman's habitual expression of dyspeptic discomfort took on an edge of actual anguish. He said, "Like maybe Mister Wiggs of the Caviar Patch ... and have every jerk quickie producer beat us to the starting gate?"
Inured to his manager's barbs, Alan ignored the thrust. He said, "There's plenty of unmined ore lying around on the library shelves."
"Bombsville!" Stanley's eyes were on the ceiling, revealing a narrow strait of white between the bottom of each pupil and the lid beneath ... a certain sign that his convoluted Byzantine brain was moving under full compression. Without looking down, he added, "You think maybe Irra would do like Merrick with Dolly ... hang the film release date on when Metropole winds up its stage runs?"
"Maybe ... I guess so. But, Stan-baby, how's that gonna help us?" Irra could put road shows in Mozambique and run it for ten! He's bought himself the U.S. Mint ... and he's not throwing all that bread away for five million clams he's gonna get anyhow."
"Maybe we can give him a shave," mused Stanley, his eyes still on the ceiling. "A lot of funny things can happen to any show ... especially when it's a long way from home."
"As long as you don't shoot the goose," said Alan.
"Baby!" Stanley's eyes came down from the ceiling to regard Alan with the gentle reproach of a wounded deer. "You don't trust me." .
"You're a burglar." Alan fought a grin, lost. "And Irra Naismith isn't?"
They were still smiling at one another when Sally-Jo came briskly in, carrying an unattached telephone. She plugged it into a nearby wall outlet, moved Alan's dishes to make room for it.
"Jesus, baby, I told you no calls!" Alan scowled at her.
"It's Steed," Sally-Jo baby-voiced.
"That's okay then." Alan picked up the instrument. "What'd you do, you old bastard ... shoot your caddy?"
He warmed to the husky and lucrative Bonnett baritone that sounded in his ear with a rich series of obscene insults, including, " ... trying to do you a favor, you impotent old gigolo. Listen good ... I'm coming on to save your party tonight."
"Who needs you, party pooper?"
"One of the chicks called this morning and said you weren't exactly a ball of lava last night ... so Old Steed's flying to the rescue. Jesus, man, we can't let them New York broads get the wrong idea about Hollywood."
"I can screw you under the table the best fucking night you ever had, you stupid shit," said Alan, laughing.
"If you're really gonna screw me, I'd prefer a bed," said Steed in the mincing tones of a homosexual.
Alan whooped, then said, "Where in hell are you?"
"At Van Nuys Airport, all pissed up and ready to go."
"Make .sure you take a plane this time," said Alan, still laughing.
"If this thing I got warming up ain't a plane," said Steed, "it'd better start laying eggs pretty soon. I laid out enough bread on it ... with plenty of that old high-priced spread, too."
"When do you think you'll get in?" Alan asked. He had laughed too much for further badinage. "Maybe eight o'clock ... New York time,"
Steed told him. "Well, I'm on my way now, you lucky bastard ... and just to show you my heart's still halfway between the knees and the navel, I'll fly you back here tomorrow."
When Alan hung up, he told Stanley about Steed's offer. Stanley sighed, belched, rubbed his stomach, said, "Just as long as you're back Tuesday. Don't let that meshuggenah bastard fly you to Europe instead."
He peered again at his watch, rose abruptly, said sourly, "Not having private transportation, I've got to get to Kennedy."
* * *
At half past eight that evening, Tanya Trowbridge sat in a brocaded damask armchair in the chaste but opulent lobby of the Eastside Plaza. She was battling timidity and frustration, struggling to buoy up her resolution to present herself to her real father. It was beginning to crumble after some thirty hours of splendid isolation since her move into a tower room of the hotel the afternoon before.
Tanya had never felt so alone in her life ... or to have so fruitlessly wasted her time. She had not been permitted to reach the penthouse on the phone, much less in person. Even the top landing of the fire stairs had offered her nothing but a knobless, lockless, salmon-pink steel door.
A rebuff would have been an improvement ... it would have represented attainment of a sort, however negative. But to be physically so close to Alan Clark and unable to reach even one of his entourage on the hotel phone....
It was funny in a gruesome sort of way. It was also infuriating.
She had even considered setting the hotel on fire but discarded the idea as un-likely to succeed. The place was so damned fireproof.
She was toying with the thought of calling Phil and eating her crow en brochette ... he had warned her that the whole idea of moving into the Eastside to meet Alan was a wild goose chase in a mare's nest. Her growing sense of aloneness clamored for relief.
But not yet, she told herself firmly. The evening was still in its infancy. There would be ample time to reach Phil later. She considered inviting him to her room ... at least it would make her plush prison cell memorable for something beside frustration ... but dropped the thought quickly. This damnably efficient caravanserai was undoubtedly well equipped with house detectives.
If she went with Phil later, it would have to be once again his apartment on Murray Hill. If she went....
Her body was making its demands felt with ever-growing insistence.
She grew aware of a sudden sea-change in the normal twilight quiet of the lobby, looked up and around. A dark, curly-haired, casually handsome male was striding with easy assurance toward the gift counter at the south end of the immense foyer. Tanya stiffened to attention, her antennae quivering alarms.
It was unmistakably Steed Bonnett, the screen and television star, much publicized close friend of Alan Clark.
In his wake flowed an extravagantly sun bronzed blond, whose implausible straw-gold hair fell in a sleek cascade to the small of her back ... plus a fussed-looking paunchy little man in black coat and striped trousers, obviously of the hotel management.
Like an automaton, Tanya rose and moved after them, joined a burgeoning little crowd of furred and scented Bonnett fans who seemed to spring out of the deep-pile lobby carpet. As she drew close, she heard the blonde say in rich southern accents, "But why not go right on up?"
Bonnett gave the girl an amiably intimate pat on her mini-covered bottom, said, "Can't do it, sweetie ... not without picking up something for Alan."
As Tanya stood by in silence, her adrenals pumping, Steed selected an absurd and huge stuffed camel...."No, sweetie, the one with two humps is much more appropriate" ... then swung to face the ring of adorers who had gathered around him in a palpitant half circle.
"Arnie Palmer ought to see this," he said, raking them with his frankly lascivious grin as if he were ogling each of them individually. "He thinks he's got an army!" Then, as someone dug pad and ballpoint from a fat handbag, "Sorry, girls ... I just got through making out an alimony check for my ex-wife, and I'm suffering from an advanced case of writer's cramp."
He grabbed his right elbow and grimaced in mock-agony ... then he was off, carrying the cellophane-wrapped camel under one arm, leaving his adorers behind in a state of ecstatic paralysis. As he passed Tanya, the little hotel manager, almost running to keep up, panted, "Just follow me, please, Mr. Bonnett."
Still on automatic drive, Tanya fell in behind the blonde, who was bringing up the rear of the small procession. At least, she thought, if she didn't actually get to the penthouse, she might find out how it was reached ... but then a quartet of white surpliced Dominican nuns moved serenely and implacably across her path. By the time Tanya had got around them, her quarries had disappeared.
It was like something out of the Arabian Nights ... as if an Ali Baba had cried, "Close, sesame!" and the wall had swallowed them up.
Tanya went off automatic and stood there trembling, feeling slightly sick to her stomach. Suddenly, she needed fresh air desperately and moved toward the Park Avenue entrance.
The chill night air restored her. She inhaled deeply, decided to take a stroll around the block. Save for her fruitless climb up the fire stairs, she had been utterly sedentary since moving into the big luxury hotel. She turned south, toward Grand Central, then east, toward Lexington, moving briskly against the cold.
Some fifty feet ahead of her, the Bonnett entourage emerged from an inconspicuous side door, moved on ten yards and turned in at another minor portal. Just before they disappeared again, Tanya heard the blonde drawl peevishly, "If you think I'm going through a basement garage to get to the penthouse, you're out of your fucking mind."
Steed Bonnett's reply was lost as the second door closed behind them, but Tanya had heard enough to know that, behind this entry, lay the direct route to her target.
She walked toward it slowly, her pace lagging as she pondered how best to maneuver an approach that would get her past whatever barriers lay behind it. She was beginning to realize that celebrities of the caliber of Alan Clark are sheltered from the public like monarchs or presidents, and for the same reasons ... privacy and protection.
As she stood lost in thought, trying desperately to come up with something, a cab pulled in at the curb. From its depths emerged a plump little man with rimless glasses, followed by a tall, handsome mulatto girl in glittering black leather Cossack coat with pants to match. From one shoulder a camera case hung on a strap, from the other a shapeless container that undoubtedly held auxiliary photographic equipment.
They moved toward the entry, and Tanya fell in behind and followed them inside. She stood close by them while they waited for the single elevator. She heard the redhead say, "I hope to hell we get some wild shots at this bash."
"You will," said the little fat man.
"Some the magazine can print, I mean," said the colored girl.
"That's your job." The little man sounded irritable. "Here it is."
The elevator door slid back in silence and they all stepped inside. Neither the youthful operator nor her two companions questioned Tanya's presence as they rose swiftly upward. When the car stopped and the door slid open once more, Tanya's adrenals went into action again.
She had it made!
She stepped out into the foyer of the penthouse suite and felt delightfully engulfed in warmth and luxury and interesting-looking strangers and sounds of talk and laughter and the treble clink of glasses and, from somewhere out of sight in the background, the soft swift bass beat of jazz.
Then she stepped forward, intent on losing herself in the party until she could get her bearings ... and found her passage blocked by a reedy, exquisite young man in a canary velvet and black satin dinner jacket, a young man with eyes of black and gold that seemed to pierce her skull.
"Just a moment, darling," he drawled. "Who are you?"
"Tanya Trowbridge." What else could she say?
"Were you invited?"
Mentally backpedaling, Tanya pointed toward the little fat man and his mulatto camera girl, who were still close by, divesting themselves of their wraps. She said, "I came with them."
"Mr. Bellows!" The young exquisite summoned the little fat man, and it was all over, the door once again slammed in her face, and Tanya was riding down in the private elevator with the Cerberus in canary and black ... shut out on the trembling lip of success.
Her escort was not unkind ... but his impersonal politeness was even more chilling. He said, "I do hope you'll try to understand, darling. We have to be so very, very careful ... you have no idea! We get more crooks and cranks than the President himself, I sometimes believe."
Then, as the elevator struck bottom, "I'm not questioning your motives, Miss Trowbridge, but don't try it again! I never forget a name ... or a face!"
As she slunk back into her lonesome tower single, Tanya believed him. Somehow, the fact that her interceptor was blatantly and unashamedly a fag made him all the more frightening. She lit a cigarette, discovered her hands were shaking.
She had stood within the gates of an enchanted heaven filled with fascinating angels ... only to have a homosexual St. Peter refuse her entry. She told herself firmly, "I'm not going to cry."
And then, of course, she did.
When she recovered, she decided enough was enough and put in a call for Phil Barrett at The Dry Martini. Perhaps, she thought, sniffling as she waited for his voice, in California things would be different.
CHAPTER SIX
Alan leaned back against the living room end of the penthouse bar, where he could watch most of the action, and thought. This bash isn't dying ... it's stillborn.
There they were, the beautiful people, the fabulous people, his people, carefully sieved and winnowed, out for a ball ... and nobody was having one. Instead of swinging, they were standing around in stiff little thickets of fabric, flesh and hair, like so many badly grouped dummies in Lord & Taylor's windows.
In the far corner, where they had put the piano, Joe Link, plus the expert quintet he had brought downtown, might have been playing into a vacuum. Alan shuddered as Johnny Lutos jammed his octave pad key and blew a clam ... probably the first note he had missed, man and boy, drunk, sober and high, in fifteen years.
He saw Joe start like a goaded steer as the jarring sounded behind him and thought, it figures ... just one false note. Just one false note....
He sipped the ice-diluted brandy and soda he had nursed for a full half hour. It tasted like rubber in a used tire shop. He told himself he didn't give a damn ... and the fact that he didn't scare hell out of him.
Until this night, he had been a guy who took pride in playing the perfect host, in tossing parties that popped, rattled and rode, parties that swung and reverberated down the memory lanes of those who had the good fortune to be invited. When they flattened out, as some parties must, he had been a guy quick to re-energize them with a song, with a gag or merely with the hypodermic impetus of his own personality.
This night's bash lay flat as the wall-to-wall carpet on which it was held ... and he didn't give a flying fuck in hell about picking it up. Jesus, he thought, I'm getting old!
Maybe a good stiff double. He turned toward the bar behind him to obtain a freshly filled glass ... and found himself face to face, tit to tit, with the dizzy straw blond from the South that Steed had flown in from Hollywood. Waves of jasmine enveloped him, causing him to react with a faint stir of nausea.
She writhed like a cat in heat, brushing her pelvis knowingly, meaningfully, against his, but her amber eyes reflected discontent rather than sensuality. She said in her crossroads courthouse drawl, "Are yo' gonna stand there like a cigar store Indian an' let that fat li'l ol' writer louse up yo' party?"
"Think you can carry his typewriter?" Alan asked, catching the bartender's eye across the flank of her pale gold hair and giving him the nod for a refill.
"Mebbe not ... but I got a couple things he sho' can't carry." She thrust them against him as she spoke and he saw that she was pleasantly stacked indeed.
She was right, of course. Gilbert Bellows was the plump skeleton at the feast, the worm in the apple, the joy-blocking clinker in the furnace of fun. The author had been buttonholing people all evening, asking them questions that jarred them out of the mood for frolic, busy as a desert rat turned loose in mother lode ... and, since he represented the awesome power of a magazine whose circulation ran well into eight figures, inhibiting everyone.
"Y'know what that li'l bastard had the nerve to ask me?" The amber eyes were on him, hard as marbles.
Alan shook his head as he reached around her and got his fresh drink into action.
"He had the colossal gall to ask me how many studio executives I had to screw to get me a screen test ... only he didn't say screw. He used some insultin' medical term like cohabit ... cohabit!"
"Well, how many did you have to cohabit with, honey?" Alan barely suppressed a yawn as he picked up the bait.
"Don' you go gettin' nosy!" Her expression and pose softened as if she had punched a button labeled sultry and the jasmine engulfed him again.
He pulled away from her with his upper body, waved away at the air between them, said, "Honey, you should smoke a pipe or stick to spray colognes. You're a blond this week ... or did you forget to check yourself out?"
This time the button he punched was labeled fury. It crackled between them like static electricity. He wondered if she would have the nerve to tell him off. She did.
"If Steed hadn't told me about yo', Alan Clark, I'd swear you've had it. Confidentially, I think yo' stink."
"And I know you do," he told her, "even at forty dollars an ounce, or whatever jasmine costs these days."
For a moment, he thought she was going to slap his face. He half-hoped she would ... for if she had, he might have been able to like her and he needed to like somebody just then. Instead, she crumbled, turned away from him and moved to the far end of the bar.
A cunt, he decided, a cheap cunt. He wondered, not for the first time, at Steed's remarkable lack of judgment in women. He tried to recall who it was that had said anyone could be a Casanova if he didn't mind a diet of potatoes and cabbage.
He took another pull at his drink and thought, a dingaling ... a real dingaling!
He wondered why in hell he had been so gratuitously rude to her. It wasn't like him, and that worried him, too. He took another big swallow, choked on it, coughed into his handkerchief, had to wipe tears from his eyes when the fit passed.
Looking around, momentarily bleary, he saw that the living room groupings had shifted. Gilbert Bellows, glass in hand, had Steed backed against the wall ... a tiny Boston bulldog worrying a great Dane. The author's bald head was making the highlights dance with the rapid-fire intensity of his questions. Steed was in obvious distress, craning his neck, looking desperately about the room over his tormentor in search of an escape route.
The high-yellow camera girl Bellows had brought with him chose that moment to go into a crouch, sighting her lens upward to get the two of them from a low angle. A greyhound, Alan thought, relishing the rare grace with which she assumed a half-squat, then rose to set her camera for the next series of shots. It occurred to him that he was tagging people suddenly with various species of dogs, decided he was doing so because Steed's blond was such a bitch.
As if on cue, she reappeared at his side, highball in hand, again smothering him with jasmine. She laid a hand on his forearm, shook back pale blond hair from her face, said, "Y'know what else the sonofabitch asked me? He asked me how many times I've screwed yo' ... 'n' we never even met before t'night.
"'S when I split. I let him think whatever he wanted to do with his dirty little cocksuckin' mind. But it did give me sort of an idea, darlin'. I don' think it would be the right thing to leave an em ... an eminent author like that with a false impression ... do yo'?"
Alan looked down speculatively at the lush body thrust closely against his own. He felt a stir in his loins, sensed by the added thrust of her against him, by the slow up curl at the corners of her near thin lips, that she felt it, too. She had to be a tremendous lay or Steed wouldn't have brought her.
But there was something about her ... her aggressiveness, her built-in bitchiness, perhaps ... that set his teeth on edge. He might have known too many like her ... or just one.
Her pale lashes flashed upward, suddenly hot amber eyes blazed into his own. She said, "Aren't you' gonna say anythin'?"
Steed Bonnett crashed into the scene like a Patton tank, muttering furious old-country Italian curses under his breath. Alan, who had picked up a smattering of the language from long association with him, as well as from other Italian musicians and composers, was able to understand that Steed was evoking certain saints to perform certain unsavory rites upon Bellows as they must already certainly have performed them upon his female ancestors. Steed plucked a bottle of bonded bourbon from the bar, poured a ten-ounce tumbler half full, drained it without a quiver of the cords in his throat. Putting it down hard on the bar top, he turned to Alan, jerked a thumb in the direction of the author, said, "Friendship is friendship, paisan, but either he goes or I go."
"Cool it, Steed," said Alan. "So the little creep's a drag ... his magazine has twelve million net paid."
Slightly taller than Alan, Steed looked down on him, nostrils distended, dark eyes wide. He said, "You know what the shit-heel wanted to know? He wanted to know if it was true Tina divorced me because I tried to go down on her!"
Alan was tempted to say, "I thought it was the other way around," but held his tongue. Of stout Abruzzi peasant stock, a first-generation American, Steed believed devoutly in the marriage vows, at least as they applied to his ex-wife, Tina. And a Steed Bonnett roused to fury was something Alan had no desire to handle ... ordinarily of a gentle, even sunny, disposition, Steed had been known to tear a nightclub men's room apart with his bare hands when in anger.
So he held silent. Steed belched, rammed the end of a fist into his diaphragm, added, "I ain't just whistling Dixie, boy. It's that cube or me."
"I'll see what I can do," said Alan. He handed the straw blond to his friend. "Here, darling, sing something simple. He's hot as a pistol."
He took off in search of Lucky Winsted, whose stint of playing watchdog in the foyer should be about over for the night. But before he could clear the living room, he was halted by the pert soubrette of a current Broadway musical hit, by a Vega showgirl wearing more diamonds than fabric, by the A & R man of his recording company, by a colored composer of wildly successful popular tunes in the current idiom and by Adrienne Witherspoon, Irra Naismith's dyke secretary, who he did not remember inviting.
The soubrette wanted to resume a last-year's romance over lunch on the morrow, the showgirl wanted to introduce her current keeper, the A & R man tried to tell him a new and highly topical dirty joke, the composer wanted to set up a party in Harlem later that morning, while Adrienne wanted to know when the cameleopards were going to be brought in.
All in all, a fair sampling....
Finally working his way clear, Alan found Lucky chatting in the foyer with Gilbert Bellows' camera girl, who was in the act of assembling her gear and outer garments.
"What the hell's a cameleopard?" he asked.
Two pairs of eyes regarded him incredulously. Lucky said, "Maybe you'd better take a little nap, Coach."
"You don't know?"
Lucky shook his carefully sculptured haircut. Alan drew him clear of the girl said, sotto voce, "Then get Bellows out of the play or there's going to be bloodshed."
"Whose?"
"Bellows'," said Alan. Steed's steaming."
"Any ideas?"
"Any at ail, Lucky. You always come up with the perfect ploy. That's why I pay you,"
"Pussy juice!" Lucky snorted. "You pay me because you love me, sweetie."
"Some day...." said Alan, glowering with mock ferocity.
Lucky flirted his bottom at Alan as he moved briskly toward the living room, humming the Air Force song over, rather than under, his breath. Alan shook his head, smiled reluctantly, discovered the graceful coffee-and-cream camera girl standing beside him, her black leathers buttoned, her kit over her shoulders.
She said, "Giraffes."
It stopped him cold. He could only goggle at her. She half-smiled at his confusion, a child's hesitant smile of slow delight. Then she said, "You asked what a cameleopard is. It's what they used to call giraffes before they knew what they were. They do look something like spotted camels."
"This is my night for camels," he muttered, thinking of the stuffed animal Steed had brought with him. Then, as the girl photographer moved toward the door, "Hey! you're not splitting now?"
She paused. It was her turn to look confused. She said, "I felt...."
She spoke in a soft contralto, as delicately textured as her cafe-au-lait complexion. She added, "I thought one of us ought to leave. I mean, like we don't seem to be helping your party."
''You and who else?" he asked.
She said, ''You must have noticed ... the girl with the straw-colored hair."
''Has she been giving you trouble?"
''Not really ... not yet," the dark girl replied. ''But it's there."
"What do you say we split together?" he asked on sudden impulse. "I don't think either of us is doing the party much good."
"But...." He had stopped her cold. He saw the questions gathering behind the sudden, fascinating furrows in her brow. Inwardly, he sighed, awaiting the difficulties she was about to put in the path of his impulse ... it was, he thought regretfully, that kind of night.
Then, magically, her forehead smoothed and she smiled, a flash of snow-white teeth against the dark tan of her skin. She said, "Why not?"
"You know any place to go . r. some place we can have a quiet drink?"
She thought a moment, then nodded. He took her arm and moved toward the elevator. Over his shoulder, he said, "They'll do okay without us." Suddenly Steed's blond bitch was hugging his other arm, saying, "Wheahevah yo' go, I go. That's orders."
"Whose orders?" he asked, tempted to shake her off and push her out of the running.
"Mine," said the girl from the Deep South.
He looked at the camera girl. She rolled her eyes. Inspiration, stimulated by his nowhere mood and the brandy seized him. He winked at his first choice, then said, "Come along, then."
"That's my intention," the blond said firmly. When they got outside, the chill of the night hit Alan like a blow in the face. With incredulity, he discovered that he was well on the way to being drunk.
"It's only four blocks," the camera girl informed him, heading them east. "We can walk it."
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was Phil Barrett who saw them come in. He lost a beat in the chorus of Honeysuckle Rose and Tanya, sitting beside him on the piano bench, looked at him in surprise. Out of the corner of his mouth, Phil said, "What'd you use ... black magic?"
Puzzled, she said, "What are you talking about?"
In response, he nodded toward a far corner of the little restaurant saloon. Tanya followed his gaze and turned to stone. Unbelievably, Alan Clark was taking his place in the center of a semicircular red leather banquette seat between two girls.
I'll be an unkie's monocle ... she thought. It couldn't be! But it unmistakably was. She noticed that he tottered a trifle, had to steady himself with knuckles on the table as he sat down. Dear old dad!
One of the girls, she noted, was the straw blond who had come into the Eastside Plaza with Steed Bonnett. The other was the lovely and lissome high yellow, whom Tanya had seen in The Dry Martini once or twice before.
Ever since Tanya had had time to digest the bombshell fact that Alan Clark was her true father, she had been mentally rehearsing how she would approach him whenever opportunity offered. Should she greet him with gentle directness (I'm Ellen Rogers' daughter....")? Should she essay a general social approach and trust in whatever charm and comeliness she possessed to attract him sufficiently to build a situation in which she could make her revelation discreetly? Should she give him the waggish gambit ("Hi, Dad....") and confuse him with the slang use of the word before putting her point across?
All these she had considered and weighed against the possible conditions of a meeting when and wherever it occurred.
But it had never entered her wildest imagining that Alan Clark might drop in at The Dry Martini while she was there with Phil ... loaded and with two other girls. She sat on the piano stool, paralyzed, unable to think, numbed by the miracle of Alan's presence, by her first sight of him in the flesh, no more than twenty feet away.
She thought, how blue his eyes are ... he looks so tanned and fit ... and so young to be my father....
"Now's your chance," whispered Phil, concluding Honeysuckle with a soft series of minor chords.
She watched Mike, the waiter, put a bottle of brandy and ice-filled glasses on the table in front of the threesome, saw Alan gesture the blond to fill their glasses, saw him all but turn his back on her.
Until that moment, Tanya had not been aware of the fact that she was plagued with the bacillus of race prejudice. There had been colored kids in all but two schools she had attended, and she had felt toward them and treated them like the rest of her schoolmates.
"Come on, darling!" It was Phil, urgently. "If you won't go to him, let's see if we can't get him over here. Let's give him the Sally song."
Tanya shook herself out of it. Goosepimples of embarrassment were chasing themselves up her spine. But Phil was right. She flashed a smile at him and picked up the beat as he slid into the introduction.
The Sally song was really three old numbers, which they had worked up together about six months earlier, more to amuse themselves than with any professional outlet in mind. But when they had sprung it on a small crowd at The Dry Martini, the people had loved it. The number was based on Sally in Our Alley, Frivolous Sal and Sally Is a Good Old Girl, with the beats knocked into a whole flock of cocked hats ... ballad style, blues style, rock, swing and even ragtime, with plenty of room, for Phil to take a trio of long piano solos and for Tanya to beat out a pair of riff choruses.
Tanya stood up and went into the unused opening, grateful for the opportunity to put her mind on something beside what Alan Clark was doing in the banquette with the mulatto girl.
"If anybody here is named Sally," she intoned, "better fasten you seat belt or take off for the powder room ... for we are about to engage in a musical investigation of how and why so many Sallies of song are cypriennes, femmes du pave, ladies of the evening, courtesans ... oh, hell, whores."
"You don't believe it? Then listen to this...."
They took off on the familiar home-made arrangement, which lasted a full twelve minutes. To her surprise under the circumstances, Tanya found herself in excellent voice. Having done choir and glee club work in her various schools, she was not a wholly untrained singer ... and she had been listening to and copying the recordings of Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O'Dea, Peggy Lee, Ethel Ennis and other jazz-singing greats ever since she had become aware of their existence at the age of thirteen.
Ordinarily, like most amateurs, her renditions were full of flaws ... failures of tone and resonance, over-elaborate phrasing, a tendency to mix styles in a single chorus ... flaws of which she had only become aware in the past year, since she began spending time with Phil.
Had Alan's behavior not shocked her and Phil not put her in vocal action, she would never have had the courage to sing in front of a great pop singer like her true father ... but now that she was launched, she felt an assurance that had only rarely flowed through her before ... and then only after a great many more drinks than the three she had consumed this evening.
She glanced at Phil once or twice while the number was in progress, saw pleasure and pride in his return look ... and his approval increased her assurance. When they concluded, she was well aware that they had never worked better together.
She wound it up with, "Well, how come so many Sallies are musical whores? Oh, just lucky, I guess ... and think of all the money they make."
Whenever they had done the Sally number before, The Dry Martini customers had applauded them wildly ... but, although there were at least a score of people present at the banquette tables or the bar up front, hardly a pair of hands clapped.
All attention was riveted upon the corner in which Alan Clark and the two girls sat ... and it appeared un-likely that Alan had heard a note of their performance, so absorbed was he in making open love to the beauty on his left with the cafe au-lait skin.
He was nuzzling her, nibbling her ear, and she was laughing softly and responding to his caresses--his right hand no longer gripping a brandy glass.
A glance at the straw blond told Tanya that Steed's Hollywood import was seething. Her near beautiful face had assumed an expression of sullen fury as she toyed with the stem of her inhaler. She put a hand on Alan's upper arm to get his attention, and the Clark baritone, though pitched low, carried through the pin-drop silence of the room.
"Later, baby ... can't you see I'm busy?"
He didn't even halt his caressing of the girl or turn his head to look at the blond.
She stood up suddenly, all but overturning the table in front of them. Her deep South drawl rose to a piercing whine as she cried, "Alan Clark, you're nothin' but a dirty prick!"
She seized the brandy bottle, lifted it, brought it down viciously at the singer's head. Jules, the headwaiter, made a desperate lunge to block the blow but he was too far away ... nor, as things turned out, was he needed.
The room itself seemed to gasp its alarm.
But Alan, perhaps sensing the blond's intention, had swung about swiftly. A sure right arm was upthrust, strong fingers caught his assailant's rapidly descending wrist in time. Apparently his grip was cruel, because she uttered a sharp yelp of anguish and the bottle flew out of her hand to describe a slow aerial parabola before dropping to the carpeted floor with an indifferent thud.
Her fury intensified, the blond leapt at him, her talons curled to scratch his eyes out ... but by this time Jules and a pair of waiters were on hand to grab her and pull her away, struggling.
"Sorry," Alan was politeness itself as he spoke to Jules. "The young lady is a little excitable, I fear. Perhaps it would be better if we left., too."
Jules, bowing and scraping, assured him that this was not true, but Alan led the mulatto girl inexorably toward the front entrance ... and a shell-shocked Tanya noted that she clung to him like an all-night sucker.
Then they were gone ... the Ali Baba bit all over again ... and she had had no chance to get close to him, much less to identify herself.
Again, fiasco.
Jules approached the piano, mopping his brow. "Mr. Clark asked me to give you this." He placed a bill on the piano top, shook his head and went about his business. Phil picked it up, looked at it, whistled, showed it to Tanya.
It was a hundred-dollar bill.
When they got back to his Murray Hill pad, they had a drink in the kitchen together instead of going straight to bed as was their custom. Tanya felt oddly unclean ... if this was what Alan Clark was j really like, she wondered fearfully as to her own heritage. Mousing around with a girl ... in public. Obviously taking her off somewhere to spend the rest of the night with her.
Phil broke into her reverie. "I don't know what this means to you, sweetie, but what happened at the club tonight was none of your doing ... or was it?"
She shook her head.
"I've got a hunch Alan was deliberately putting down that blond," he said thoughtfully.
"What makes you think so?"
"Her Southern accent when she blew her stack. And the way he was ready for her when she swung that jug. If he wasn't putting it on ... well, put on or not, it looks as if Maggi Burke took home the marbles."
"Is that her name ... the girl?"
"That's right, hon. She's a good kid ... a staff photographer on America. "
"Have you been in bed with her?" Tanya asked. Phil shook his head. "No such luck. Not that I'd have minded until you stepped up the pace this last week. Don't worry, darling." He stood over her, looked down at her with a glow of desire in his eyes. "With you around I've got nothing for anyone else."
She had to do something ... something special ... to wipe the entire Alan Clark obsession from her psyche. Put on or not, he had played a disgusting role in a disgusting scene. He was probably poking it into Maggi Burke at that very instant while she writhed and made horrid little sounds of delight.
She pulled out a pair of cigarettes, laid them on the kitchen table before her. She said, "May I look at the tip Alan gave us?"
"Why not? I have a hunch he gave it to us by way of apology for not listening to us."
He handed it to her. Tanya, stretched it flat between her fingers, looked at it, turned it over.
"We'll split it tomorrow when I get to the bank," he told her.
"Why wait till tomorrow?" She put both cigarettes in her mouth, picked up a pack of matches, lit one end of the bill and used it to light both cigarettes. Then she handed him one of them, dropped the still flaming remnants of the bill into the ashtray on the table.
Phil looked as if he had been hit on the head with the blond's brandy bottle. He said, "Hey! For God's sake, Tan...."
"So I owe you fifty," she said, settling back in her chair.
She felt able to relax for the first time since Ellen had dropped the bomb about Alan being her true father. The fixation was over, fini, kaput, wiped out.' When she went to bed with Phil in a little while, she would no longer be subject to the frantic fantasy that it was not Phil but her father making love to her ... it might not be as wildly voluptuous, but she was quite willing to surrender a degree of rapture for a return to amorous sanity.
But when Phil entered her, the unreality was more real, the reaction more frantic, the experience more voluptuous and terrifying than ever before ... and the hollow tooth demanded refilling a half dozen times before slumber took over her ravaged senses.
Even in her sleep, Tanya could not turn off. She dreamed wildly erotic dreams ... and Alan Clark was her partner in all of them.
She was hooked.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The bed was big, the room was warm, both bodies were young and strong and beautiful and. tender. As Tanya lifted her head from the redhead's clitoris and looked out the picture window, all she could see was fog. It was springtime in Hollywood and the climate was lousy except for sex.
She rubbed the blend of saliva and pussy juice that covered her lower face on the sleek white abdomen of the girl she had just sent rocketing to heaven. Dee Larkin quivered convulsively beneath her and gasped, "Hey, cut that out, darling!" Tanya sat up and pushed her dark hair clear of her face and looked down at her roommate, wondering mildly how she had ever managed to get herself embroiled erotically with another female. It had its points, of course. Dee was a delightful rough-and-tumble companion and she knew the ins and outs of the film capitol like the young veteran she was ... but, as a lead to Alan Clark, she had thus far proved a washout.
Emerging from her post-orgasmic private fog, the redhead turned to Tanya and caressed the fine fullness of her breasts. Tanya submitted, enjoying the erotic stimulation of her roommate's loose lips and slow, wet tongue upon her nipples. Already at half-staff, she could feel them stiffen and harden under the slow, lingering kisses.
Dee's hands slid lower along Tanya's smooth flanks and curled around the firm globes of her buttocks, pulling her close against her roommate's ebullient body. Looking down, she could see only the pale copper hair atop Dee's head as she began lowering her lips and tongue toward Tanya's already creaming clitoris. Adroit fingers slid past the cleft in her rear to test her crucial area.
Little waves of voluptuous delight radiated through Tanya's body. Not for the first time, she was dose to submitting to the redhead's erotic persuasions. But, with a sudden burst of willpower, she stiffened and used her deceptive strength to push the larger girl clear of her body.
"Sorry, darling," she said. "That's a restricted zone."
Dee gave up and rose to a sitting position, a fine, opulent girl with a sweetly freckled face and the wisdom of an ancient temple priestess in her eyes. She said, "Restricted for what? That's what I'd like to know."
"If I told you, you wouldn't believe it," said Tanya, reaching for a cigarette.
"Try me ... "
"I'm already trying you too much," said Tanya. Then, "But I don't understand your beef. I'm giving you your jollies."
Dee put her arms around Tanya once more, kissing her on the lips ... lingeringly. Her tongue made sweet little circles upon and inside Tanya's mouth, and the dark-haired girl from Long Island responded in kind.
"Damn it, I love you, you beautiful jerk," said the redhead with sincerity in the slight cigarette rasp of her voice. "I want to give you your kicks along with getting mine. It takes two to tango, you know."
Tanya said, "Pearl Bailey, circa nineteen forty-seven."
"Bitch!" said Dee Larkin, laughing. "I'd still like to know what it's reserved for."
"Who do you think? Me, naturally, I'm saving my nickels to go to Copenhagen and have myself made into a hermaphrodite. Then I shan't have to bother with anybody else for my kicks."
"You're a kook," accused the redhead. Then she began to laugh until she fell back on the bed, snorting and gurgling with mirth.
Tanya regarded her gravely, not really seeing her. She wondered how in hell she could explain to anyone short of a psychiatrist her reasons for withholding herself from such a harmless and pleasant relationship ... especially with a girl who had been so helpful and friendly in abetting the quest of which she knew nothing.
Within seventy-two hours of her disastrous repulse from the Eastside Piazza penthouse and the subsequent visit of Alan Clark and the two girls to The Dry Martini, Tanya had been on a plane for Los Angeles ... alone and armed only with her cashier's check and a few hundred dollars in cash and the precious letter her grandmother had ferreted out.
Plus, of course, her determination to make herself known to her celebrated real father.
But making contact with Alan Clark in his own ballpark had proved even more difficult than in Manhattan. Briefed by Phil Barrett on at least some of the mores of Hollywood ... Phil had played and sung a season in various bites littered through the West Hollywood-Beverly Hills portions of the California metropolis ... she had taken an apartment in a modestly modern, medium-sized apartment house just below the Sunset Strip.
For a couple of weeks, she had tried to discover where her father lived ... to no avail. She had even been naive enough to take a See-the-Stars' Plomes bus trip and thrilled when Alan Clark's "mansion" in Beverly Hills was pointed out by the guide ... an imposing grey stone pile barricaded by a massive brick wall and iron gate, with a balustrade bordering its flat roof.
She had gone back there in a taxicab, immediately upon conclusion of the tour ... to be informed by a suspicious gateman that Alan Clark had not lived there for four years.
She had then invested in a small used car and taken to poring over the "trades"-the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, seeking some clue to the likely whereabouts of the man she so desperately sought. It was through the trades that Tanya had learned of AMC, Artist's Management Corporation, that listed both Alan and Steed Bonnett, along with a choice roster of other stars and important screen personages, on its list of clients.
It was through Dee Larkin, the receptionist at that opulent office building on Burton Way in Beverly Hills, that Barbara had been promptly put on the AMC payroll as a secretary stenographer.
The redhead, large and handsome and beautifully curved, had been on the personnel desk when Tanya applied and had said, after regarding her curiously, "Say, aren't you the new girl in my apartment building?" And, upon Tanya's admitting this to be so, "I've been hoping to meet you. Can you type and take shorthand?"
As it happened, Tanya could, and that was that. The rest had followed naturally enough. Within two weeks, Tanya had moved into her sponsor's apartment on the floor above. In showing it to her, Dee had remarked at the bedroom door, "I hope you won't mind sharing a bed with me ... it's large enough for three."
"Who else?" Tanya had asked. It was the two girls' first laugh together, the first of many. A fine amiable sex-and-friendship relationship had developed between them. But for two factors, the girl from Long Island would have considered it ideal. These were the fact that, to date, working for AMC had not brought her closer to her goal, plus the fact that her body was rapidly approaching the explosion point through lack of sexual release.
So complete had been the illusion that she was fucking Alan Clark during her last wild sex ball in New York with Phil Barrett, so insanely voluptuous had been her reaction ... that Tanya, in the cold light of the morning after, had taken a resolve not to engage in a sex act again until she had resolved whatever it was that was driving her up the wall.
In her own words to herself, "If I keep this up, I'll be carried away in an iron strait-jacket."
A consummation devoutly not to be desired.
Therefore, in the weeks since-the long, ever longer weeks since-Tanya had abstained from sex entirely. Although with increasing frequency, she had woken up during the night to find her fingers firmly clamped within the mouth of her vulva, she had resolutely removed them and turned over to return to the arms of Morpheus.
Although she derived considerable satisfaction, vicariously, from sucking off Dee Larkin, the one-way lesbian relationship was becoming ever more difficult to maintain as her own body threatened to take over and have its way.
What made things worse was the fact that Tanya was at most a casual switch hitter. Essentially, she wanted a man's meat, live and throbbing and thrusting, within her where it would do the most good. She needed the final spurt of a man's climax against the wall of her womb to attain complete climax. She needed the bunching of masculine stomach muscles against the softer sinews of her own belly, the hard cage of a man's ribs digging into the fullness of her bosom, the strength of a man's arms clutching her, the pounding of a man's balls against the lining of her crotch.
Being the sort of girl she was, Tanya's spotty boarding school years had not been without homosexual incident. On at least a half-dozen occasions, she had permitted herself to become involved physically ... four times with schoolmates, twice with pie-faced young female instructors who had risked instant dismissal and loss of their careers to bury their faces in Tanya's pubic hair, to caress with their lips the lips of her vulva, to enter with their eager tongues the vagina beneath.
But on all such occasions, as during her current one-way-street amour with Dee Larkin, Tanya had been flattered and mildly diverted. Not once had she been emotionally involved with a member of her own sex.
This was what was bugging her now. She was emotionally involved-with the man who had so unexpectedly been named as her father-and her incestuous desire to have him know her biblically was tightly stoppered with the cork of frustration. Feeling flattered and feeling mildly diverted were not enough.
Now it was Saturday morning, they were lying together on the big bed in the apartment she and the redhead were sharing. The spring fog, like cotton batting just outside the picture window, sealed them off from the world beyond. The weekend lay ahead of them to dispose of as they chose. Tanya had no idea what time it was nor did she care ... all that concerned her was what she should do, for Dee was once more becoming insistent.
Looking at the redhead who was holding her close and interspersing her love talk with soft little kisses, Tanya thought that Dee was one of those women who should never wear clothes.
Not that she wasn't an attractive young woman dressed for the office, for shopping or for a date ... in any other locale, she would have been a knockout. But apart from the sexually indecipherable hippie girls who thronged the Strip a half block up the hill in their shapeless shawl-and granny-glasses disguises, the two miles of Sunset Boulevard that began at Laurel Canyon Drive and rambled westward beyond Doheny to Sierra were a veritable twenty-four-hour beauty pageant.
Lovely young females were not merely a dime a dozen ... they were a nickel a hundred, all shapes, sizes and colors from ebony skinned to near albino.
Among them, a mere handsome young redhead with freckles, a well-cushioned girl with a bit too much of everything ... such a girl as Dee Larkin was wiped out. But here, naked, her fine fullness flowing free, her pale blue eyes aglow with desire, her lush lips parted to reveal the eager teeth and tongue behind them, Dee was a true erotic goddess, a priestess of passion.
She was irresistible ... and Tanya suddenly was tired to nausea of resisting anything so close and tempting. Inevitably, her arrant sense of humor asserted itself at this point in the form of a memory of an old, old joke. She said, "Snap!"
The redhead uncoiled halfway and looked at the dark-haired girl from Long Island with sudden wariness, said, "What was that?"
"Oh ... just my promise to mother," said Tanya.
Dee Larkin was understandably puzzled and annoyed. "And just what is that supposed to mean?"
"Never complain, never explain," said Tanya. She embraced her roommate and stifled her with kisses before she could voice further annoyance and knock them both out of the mood for love. For a moment, Dee remained taut and unresponsive ... but then the unexpected ardor of Tanya's assault wrought its purpose, and the redhead fell to her will.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed, Tanya thought as she opened her legs and felt her roommate move down on her. It had occurred to her that perhaps she would not suffer the incestuous Alan-Clark sublimation if a female sent her winging topside on cloud nine. She only hoped it was not merely wishful thinking caused by the sex-starved desperation of her own body.
Starvation or not, the first of Dee's clitoral caresses felt far better than those of any of the other girls who had made love to her. Sudden spurts of rapture spurted outward from her genitals to set her whole body aflame.
Sudden, long-sought suffusion flooded her insides as the reaction overwhelmed her. Blindly, she clutched at her roommate's ample bottom, pulling and tugging at the firm full flawless flesh until they were sixty-nining away with Tanya's face buried as deeply in the redhead's already creaming crotch as the redhead's face was buried in hers, lips and tongues busy, sucking and affording double penetration simultaneously.
Weil, here goes nothing again ... was Tanya's last conscious thought before voluptuous delight took complete possession of senses and body alike, making her rock and buck and roll from side to side in a succession of rapturous frenzies. Climax seized her almost instantly and, once holding her in its pulsating grip, seemed never to let her go. At irregular intervals it faded slightly, its subsidence welcomed almost with relief ... only to overwhelm her again with even greater vehemence.
Not until at last it was over and Dee had brought her gently, tenderly, back to the sweat-soaked bedding on which they lay did the big thing impress itself upon her consciousness ... not once, during the entire ultra erotic marathon, had she imagined that Alan Clark was fucking her.
"Thank God, praise Allah, hail to his prophet Muhammad Ali...!" she murmured aloud.
"You've got to be the world's kookiest," said Dee Larkin with a sigh, bending over to kiss her left nipple, now lying flat and lax as if it had never been so totally aroused mere minutes before.
"I'll drink to that," said Tanya.
"Jesus!" said the redhead, sitting bolt upright in charming post erotic dishevelment. "I'm starved. What's in the fridge?"
"Yesterday was your turn to shop," said Tanya, making a move to get out of bed. "Don't ask me." After surveying the scant and dismal contents of the refrigerator, the girls decided to walk up to the Strip and lunch at the Hamburger Hamlet, foraging for groceries at the Market in mid-block between Larabee and Clark on the way home. It was already high noon and the fog was beginning to melt away beneath a lemon-marshmallow sun.
There, they were picked up by a pair of AMC fellow-employees, Marty Dean arid Dave Sampson whom Tanya had not previously met. Marty was beanpole-tall and dark, Dave was medium high and dark. Both wore the undress uniform of rising young agency junior executives ... medium-long hair with ultra-long sideburns, tinted Bausch & Lomb sniper glasses, striped skintight slacks and costly solid-hued sports shirts in brilliant colors with low-cut necklines to reveal the dark upthrust of chest-hair beneath.
They brunched on giant cheeseburgers, pots of chili con carne and Bloody Marys, chattering about the large organization for which they all worked. Then, without anyone making a concrete suggestion, they ambled back to the girls' pad, pausing at Teddy Turner's on the corner to pick up the necessary portables ... scotch, vodka and suitable mixers.
"Thank God for Martha!" Dee said sotto voce to Tanya as the boys took their drink making ingredients to the apartment kitchenette.
"Amen!" replied Tanya. Martha was the apartment house maid, an amiable black girl with a razor-scarred cheek, who, for an extra ten bucks a week, cleaned up the girls' apartment and made the bed. On Saturdays, when they usually slept late, she lurked like a vulture in the corridor, waiting to pounce and get her work completed the moment the coast was clear.
The bed did not remain serenely chaste for long, however, as the afternoon developed into an orgy ... strangely enough, Tanya's first full fling in that department.
It simply seemed to happen that way ... as casually and as irresistibly as their joining Marty and Dave for lunch at the Hamlet. In a very real way, it was Tanya's introduction into the Hollywood scene, into the easy-going hedonism that treated sex with only the lightest brush of emotion, that made of it not an act of love but a game in which any number could play.
This time out, the number was four.
It developed out of the inevitable but fascinating shop talk that ensued with the drinks ... the boys, feeling everything was in the company family and under control, let down their verbal hair and Dee, like the AMC veteran she was, replied in kind. Tanya listened, amused and enchanted, as the entrails of the talent-agency business were laid out before her for open examination.
Both young men were on the agency payroll as account executives ... which sounded impressive but which actually meant that each was assigned to a certain female client, to keep her contented and her life and work flowing smoothly for the company. As Tanya already knew, this usually included sexual servicing as well.
"Merde, darling," Dee had informed her when, shortly after they moved in together, Tanya had expressed mild surprise at this Hollywood fact of life. "It's routine. When AMC first signed up Judy Garland, Sid Luft was assigned to her. It was the same with Doris Day and Marty Melcher ... but in her case the marriage worked a lot better-. Honey, that's show-biz. When he wrote his memoirs, Alfred Lunt told all ... how, as an eager young stud, he was given leading-man assignments to tour three successive years with three 'first ladies of the theater,' if you please ... all three of them oversexed old bats it was his duty to sleep with." Although she had seen both Marty and Dave around the office and knew who and what they were, this was her first encounter with them at close quarters ... which rapidly became a great deal closer.
Marty's assignment was a supposedly virginal little belle of the Deep South, an exquisite creature who looked as if she would blow away in a low wind and who, after starring for two years in a prime-time television series, was being spoon-fed into feature-film leading roles.
"That dumb broad," Marty sighed. "Christ, you wouldn't believe it! She keeps a statue of the Virgin in a niche in the bedroom wall of that Christ-awful pad she has up off Mulholland ... and every time she wants to go down on me, she has to get up and turn its face to the plaster.
"Only the other night, I had the little she-prick swinging pretty good. She went into a sort of mumbling routine when she came. I thought she was really over the cliff, but when I pulled out, there she was, stark naked of course, except for her rosary beads. The damn dumb little broad was counting off her Ave Marias."
"You think you've got a kook," said Dave Sampson from the sofa. "That cunt they've given me has an idea she ought to lay off bathing when she has the curse ... and, kiddies, she sweats like a fucking mule. That's what she is ... a fucking mule. Her idea of a big kick is bending over and grabbing her ankles and making me stick it into her from behind. I swear, she's got pussy hair like a goat's beard."
Dee had risen from her end of the sofa as the shorter of the two agents finished. Spreading her legs wide apart, she bent over and grabbed her ankles and, peering at the others upside down from between her legs, said, "You mean she wants it this way?"
"That's about it." Dave put down his glass and rose and stood behind her. He seized her rump and pulled it toward his rapidly swelling jock, then let her go and said, "The only difference is, that cunt does it with her clothes of off."
The redhead straightened and turned around to face the shorter of the young executives. A half smile of sheer deviltry added a thousand candlepower of sensuality to the aura of mischief she was already radiating. She said, reaching for the waistband of her flared pants, "That's easily remedied."
Watching the orgy begin, Tanya felt as if she were swimming inside a huge bowl of glycerin. She seemed insulated against everything that was happening, events that were as remote of those displayed in a stag movie. It was happening, beyond question, but it didn't seem somehow to be happening to her-not even after she found herself playing an active role in the ribald rituals that followed.
CHAPTER NINE
At first, Tanya and Marty Dean sat in as mere spectators. Tanya was already aware of the fact that her roommate-lover was a veteran participant in what the local denizens referred to as "the Hollywood Scene." But the uninhibited zest with which Dee entered into the erotic revelry came to her as somewhat of a surprise.
Though it shouldn't, she thought. After all, she's never been exactly inhibited with me. She dismissed the quick little wavelet of jealousy that swept through her as not only unworthy but idiotic. Still, it was the first time Tanya had ever witnessed copulation so openly. The time she had walked in on her mother, the more recent time when she had caught her grandmother screwing the needle-nose apartment superintendent ... those had been accidents.
As had the occasional teen-age incidents where she had peeped at couples engaged in making what Shakespeare so aptly termed the "two-backed beast."
There was nothing secretive or ashamed about the manner in which Dee and Dave went at it.
In a matter of forty seconds, the redhead had shed her scanty clothing, letting it fly in all directions, and stood before them completely nude. Once again, Tanya admired the almost Junoesque fullness of her roommate's opulent body, the well fleshed roundness of breasts and buttock, the soft tapering of thigh, the slimness of waist and neck and ankle.
She planted her hands on her hips, tossed back the pale copper mane of her hair and said. "Come on, Grandma Moses ... all those years catching up with you?"
The dot of her navel seemed to wink at Tanya while Dave took his time removing his clothing and folding it carefully over the back of a chair. His body, when it emerged, was like that of a shaggy dog, seemingly covered from collarbones to ankles with long coarse black hair, hair that matted above and below his belly button to form thickets upon his chest and about his thick, already half erect prick, which protruded like the pink-and-white ornament of some spinster's boudoir from the tangled ebony thatch.
Naked, he glanced at Tanya and Marty, gave his head and upper body a quick lateral shake, then moved in on the redhead, who resumed her bent over pose, clutching her ankles tightly with her well-manicured fingers.
He closed in on her buttocks, gripping her about the waist and thrusting his penis into her crack, letting it slide down under her crotch and thrusting gently to raise it from half mast.
Dee evidently felt its hardness increase as she wriggled responsively, for she suddenly cried, "You ram that big thing up my asshole and I'll twist it off at the base!"
"That's not quite the idea, honey," said Dave, increasing the tempo of his preliminary thrusts. After a few moments more, saw his prick spring Tanya, watching fascinated, saw his prick spring upward as it was pulled clear until its livid round tip stood level with his belly button, capping a stalk as thick as a broom handle.
Dave calmly inserted a middle finger into Dee's cunt and probed its depths. Dee's bottom went into a rotary motion of response. Her partner withdrew his digit, which glistened with pussy juice, regarded it with approval, then gripped his girl tightly by the sides of her buttocks, slid his hands back to spread them and reveal the entire armament of the redhead's crotch, pink, holy and -rimmed with soft pale-copper hair.
He thrust forward and, either by accident or prankish design, the tip of his cock probed at the puckered lips of Dee's anus, causing her to utter a squawk of alarm. With a wink at the spectators, he pulled back partway, pushed his arrant penis down with his right hand, poked it just inside the eager lips of the redhead's vulva ... and then thrust forward hard, burying his full six inches inside her until the bones of his own pelvis flattened her soft full buttocks.
"Gotcha!" he cried exultantly, and Dee uttered a moan of sheer voluptuous delight and began to buck and roll her rump under Dave's rhythmic assaults. Obscenities rolled from her lips as she heaved and gasped in floods of rapture that caused her besetter's thick prick to look as if it had been dipped in dairy cream.
Suddenly, after she had completed an especially wild gyration of her bottom, the half-smile left Dave's lips and he seized her tail in a cruel grip as his own thrusts increased in tempo. Then he held her rump tight against his own pelvis and seemed to be trying to push himself right through her and into the wall beyond.
"Oh my God!" gasped Dee as she matched his climax. Then, "Merde! How sweet it is!"
Tanya, who had watched the performance like a censor at an X-rated movie, felt an importunate tap on her arm and looked around at her tall couch mate. He said, "Do you think we should let this go to waste?" She followed his eyes to his lap. He had unzipped his slacks during the performance of Dee and Dave, and his own prick was standing stiff as a battleship flagpole.
If the other male member of the quartet was sizably equipped in the genitalia department, the tall, lean Marty was truly outstanding ... not to say upstanding, Tanya thought. It occurred to her that it would make an excellent maypole for children only slightly under normal size. It was no thicker , than Dave's big prong, but it ran really to what she inevitably thought of as dachshund length.
"Something funny?" Marty asked her, an ominous undertone in his question. Tanya realized that he took his emperor-sized prong with complete seriousness and promptly did her best to amend the impression of levity that appeared to offend him.
"Hardly," she murmured, circling his long stiff rod in the fingers of her left hand. "In fact, hardly's the word for it." With which, she bent swiftly over and kissed it, then ran her tongue around the rim of its crown before taking the entire head into her mouth and sucking on it.
As she did so, she thought, at least, doing it this way, I won't blow my stack and imagine it's Alan.
It felt unexpectedly exciting and good to have a man's cock in her mouth, to be encompassing its pulsing aliveness, to feel and transmit through her own body the mounting voluptuous sensations she was giving her partner.
Then, suddenly, he was pushing her head clear of his phallus, holding her at arm's length. He said, "Hold it, honey ... hold it."
"Don't you like it?" she asked, feeling suddenly deprived after so long a diet of no sex at all or of the, to her, less exciting lesbian variety Dee so willingly offered.
"Delicious!" he said, smiling down at her. He bent and kissed her and his tongue danced where his prick had danced moments earlier. He rose, lifting her with him, swept her toward the bedroom in the steel-thewed circle of his arm. There, pausing, he added, his eyes indicating his own clothing, then hers, "What do you say we take these damn things off?" t
Alarms clamored within Tanya, but at that moment, aroused as she was, she could no more have resisted the suggestion than she could have stopped breathing. Naked, on a bed, she was vulnerable as a periwinkle out of its borrowed shell ... so, timeless instants later, she lay naked on the bed, vulnerable as a periwinkle out of its borrowed shell.
Even as Marty admired the long-legged, longflanked sleek opulence of her body, Tanya admired his flesh. In truth, it was her first experience of a professional Hollywood stud. He was lean and long of muscle and his skin was tanned without a break from hairline to heels. Save for an abundance of dark-brown hair atop his head, at his armpits and around his jock, his skin glowed warm and healthy in the dim light of the bedroom with its Venetian blinds drawn.
He hugged her, caressing her intimate places with the skill of long experience, he bent to stir her nipples to erection, then cupped her buttocks and pulled them toward his face ... so that once again her lips were hovering over his cock while her own genitals reacted as if to the flick of a whip as his tongue entered her fur lined loving cup.
She lipped him sweetly, seized the base of his extensive phallus between thumb and forefinger, stroked the thread-like seam along its bottom with her fingertips, the while she accepted at least six inches of its length within her oral cavity. She felt it stir and stiffen still more, even as her own bottom was driven to wild thrashings when he nipped slowly at her labia majora even while his tongue-tip was beating a soft tattoo on her clitoris.
He dug even further into her with his tongue, and as she felt the convulsive start of his semen up the long tube, she gripped its base and milked him frantically, gulping down the spurting milk as it rebounded from the roof of her throat. It was the first time she had ever quaffed of such a straw and the strange salt-sweet flavor was in delicious contrast to the creaming of her roommate.
She came in that instant, letting the thrills ride free through her naked body, moaning and ramming her crack down onto his face until at last the rapture abated and she was able to pull clear. They lay together briefly, and she laughed softly, not merely in joy over her release from tension but over the fact that her incestuous obsession had not once more pervaded her being.
"That was a hell of a blow job," he said, fingering her nearer nipple and rubbing his face clean of her cream against her right arm.
"That was a hell of a cunt job," she replied, pushing his chin upward until their lips met. He rolled over and held her close ... and Tanya got the surprise of her young life.
She took it for granted, after the draining she had given him, that her lover of the afternoon would be shot down at least for a little while. But even as their lips and bodies met and fused in the sweetness of love-sweated sleekness, she felt his prick move upward against her abdomen until it seemed that it would reach her breasts.
"Good lord!" she exclaimed, and he laughed the smug soft laugh of the successful satyr. Before she could move to resist, he pulled her on top of him, lifted her and impaled her post-orgasmic liquid softness on the ready ramrod that once more stood at full cock.
As he pierced her so sweetly, she gave vent to a single long, low moan ... and then, for the first time since leaving New York, it was no longer the man she was with who was sending her rocketing off to some unimagined cavern of voluptuous delights. It was no longer Marty Dean, stranger, who was possessing her ... it was Alan Clark, the man who was her real father.
Thereafter, the world went mad for Tanya. In retrospect, she could recall only a succession of flash vignettes of the orgy ... a moment when Dave speared her from behind while she was sucking the redhead's clitoris while Dee was doing a like job on her invader ... a moment when she took on both men at one time, when the two of them did unimaginable things to Dee with their hands and lips and tongues ... a moment when she and Dee sucked one another off while the men performed a like ritual on each other.
Always, as long as a man's prick was in her vagina, it was Alan Clark who was fucking Tanya ... and the experience had not lessened with time and distance ... rather, it had sharpened to become even more unendurable than it had been in New York with Phil Barrett.
It was the aching tooth cavity that demanded constant tonguing, even though she knew it would hurt like hell ... but it didn't hurt at all and was the more horrifying for that.
When she awoke the next morning, it was to find Dee shaking her out of a drugged night-long slumber, telling her to shake a leg if she wanted to make the office on time. For a long, muscle-sore moment, Tanya feared she was not going to be able to get up at all. Then her youth and good health came to her rescue and she was able to totter into the shower.
They breakfasted in a beanery on La Cienega, and over coffee Dee Larkin shook her head and said, "Sweetie, I thought you had some kind of a sex hangup until yesterday, but I take it all back. When you swing, you really have everybody climbing the walls. Is that what they taught you in all those eastern boarding schools?"
"I worked very hard at my homework." Tanya lowered her eyes modestly and shoveled in a forkful of hashed brown potatoes. She had never been quite so hungry in her life.
"You don't care how you do it...." said the redhead, her expression and tone a blend of admiration and faint distaste. "What happened to your maidenly inhibitions?"
"The same thing that happened to yours," snapped Tanya. "Remember, you started the whole thing."
"Touch'! Had I but known...." Another headshake and a look of mock-regret. "Honey, you put those two studs right out of commission. And that's no small achievement."
"I had help ... remember?" said Tanya with fitting modesty. There was another soft burst of girlish laughter, and then it was time to ante up for the check and be on their way to work.
Despite her lightness of tone with her roommate, Tanya was badly shaken up over what had happened. To date, her trip to Hollywood had proved utterly fruitless as far as attaining her goal was concerned. Now, she had plumbed new, perhaps sick, depths of sexual depravity at the very first opportunity. She felt like the inside of a stomach ulcer. Usually, Tanya was both intelligent and efficient while at work, but so great was her inner distress, so deep her sense of guilt and frustration, that she made a number of errors that had the department supervisor eyeing her critically by mid-afternoon.
Shortly after four o'clock, she got a call from Mr. Horowitz, the vice-president in charge of personnel. She half-welcomed the dismissal she felt was coming. In a way, it would free her from the new and more enveloping set of tentacles she felt beginning to surround her.
Uttering a silent, "Well, here goes nothing," Tanya pushed into the deep-piled ultra-modern office to face the desk behind which Mr. Horowitz sat. It-was the first time she had ever been summoned upon this particular high-echelon carpet and, as she moved through the door it occurred to her that she must have made a million-dollar snafu to be called upon for explanations at this toplofty level.
Mr. Horowitz was not behind his uncluttered teakwood desk. She discovered him over by the picture window, one well-shod foot upon the rim of a stone planter from which bloomed semi-tropical vegetation, obscuring a part of the view of the smog-soft towers of Beverly Hills. But if his casual pose was reassuring, the frowning intensity with which he studied her was not.
Nor was the fact that, when he spoke, he spoke not to her but past her. He said, in a flat Manhattan accent, "She'll pass the looks barrier all right, but what about the rest of it?"
"Take my word for it, she'll do ... and in spades," said a half-familiar male voice from behind her. She spun about, startled, to see Marty Dean's lanky, nobly tailored six-foot-three-inch frame stretched out lassitudinously upon a teakwood and tweed settee against the inner wall.
"I don't know...." Mr. Horowitz, a plump, nervous little man with rimless spectacles over slightly pop eyes and a fringe of pale pink hair, left his post by the planter and began to circle slowly around her. He. reminded her of a stalking horse and she felt a mounting unease in this unrehearsed scene.
Appealing to Marty, she said over her shoulder, "If you want to know how much I weigh, it was one-seventeen by the bathroom scales this morning. And I have only one cavity."
"Which would render you practically unique amongst womankind," said Marty, fighting a smile. He hauled himself wearily to his feet, came over and put an arm around her waist, said, "Hi, honey. Up to a date tonight?"
"She doesn't look exactly the type," protested Mr. Horowitz. "She looks like a nice girl. Besides, how do we know she'll play ball?"
"What is this?" Tanya asked, her native pertness reasserting itself under Marty's encouragement. "A briefing session for Mission Impossible?"
"Sit down, sweetie." Marty led her to a chair whose softness seemed to envelop her sex-weary bottom with the luxury of soft ooze. "Mr. Horowitz has a problem he thinks you might be able to solve."
"Mr. Horowitz has a problem?" the vice president asked. "AMC has a problem ... and that means so do you, Marty ... and so do you, Miss Trowbridge, if you take it on."
He sat down abruptly behind the uncluttered desk, apparently having made up his mind in the affirmative. He peered at her over an ultra-modern bronze-and-onyx desk set, and said, "There's a hundred dollars in it for you, if you take it on."
"Jake...." said Marty Dean gently. "This is an emergency, and Tanya's a volunteer, not a conscript."
"Two bills," said Mr. Horowitz.
"Might I ask what I'm volunteering for?" said Tanya. Her curiosity was growing more cat-like with each passing second.
"First, please, a promise," said Mr. Horowitz. He leaned forward and his voice turned to oil. "I want you to promise me you'll keep your mouth shut about what I'm going to tell you, whether you decide to do it or not."
Marty snorted, said, "For Christ's sake, Jake, it's the best-worst-kept secret in Hollywood ... and besides, Tanya's on your payroll."
"Oh, very well then...." said Mr. Horowitz, looking increasingly nervous and unhappy. As he laid it out for her, Tanya was reminded of an embarrassed father endeavoring to explain the facts of life to his children for the first time.
It seemed that AMC had one very important client who had come into town unexpectedly to rehearse for Top Ten on Saturday a day early. Tanya knew the show, of course, it was one of the big network features of three years' standing that featured the biggest established and most promising new talent in a well-knit hodgepodge that passed under the name of a revue.
This particular star was so big that he frequently demanded special services from the agency, Mr. Horowitz explained unhappily, looking more and more the unhappy sire. Tanya and Marty exchanged a knowing look, and then the girl from Long Island said, "What does he want me to do ... blow him while I'm eating a banana in a tank on-stage?"
Mr. Horowitz turned a fiery red from collar to the top of his semi-bald page. He began, "Really, Miss Trowbridge, I hardly think our client will demand anything as exotic as...."
He trailed off as Marty Dean exploded in merriment, doubling up his entire length on the settee and gripping his stomach with both hands. After regarding him sourly for a long ten seconds, Mr. Horowitz said primly, "I'm damned if I see what's so fucking funny." Then, cringing, to Tanya, "Oh dear, I must apologize for uttering such a word."
"Is that a put-on?" Tanya demanded, beginning to see red herself. But it quickly developed that the demand was entirely serious, that through a series of unforeseen miscarriages of pimpery, the star's girl for after the show had not been obtainable, that someone was desperately needed to step into the breach.
Tanya's first impulse was to turn the assignment down flat. After all, she still had her insurance money, plus a bit of her salary, in the bank ... and she had been more than half-tempted to quit the agency anyway all day long. But then, out of nowhere, she recalled something someone else had said in the course of the day ... a passing shot from one girl to another, part of a discussion in which she was not concerned and to which she had only half-listened....
One of the junior executives had bustled to the water cooler and placed an Alka-Seltzer on his tongue before downing a lily cup of Arrowhead Puritas. One of the older secretaries had offered him sympathy, and he had replied, "You know what it's like when Steed Bonnett and Company hit town for a show. The shit really hits the fan!"
If Steed Bonnett needed servicing, it meant at least a shot at getting closer to her long lost father ... and after the things Tanya had done in her sexual frenzy the day before, she didn't give a damn what sort of service was required.
Looking quite serious, she said to Mr. Horowitz, "I understand. I'll be very glad to do whatever I can."
CHAPTER TEN
Alan Clark lay stretched out on a beach chair on the gaudy stone mosaic deck surrounding Steed Bonnett's Palm Springs pool. The sunlight made his skin tingle sweetly and its heat threatened to sweat the alcohol out of him faster than he could absorb more into his system. To a casual observer, perhaps flying low overhead in a helicopter, he might have looked like a man without troubles ... rich, famous, attractive, still reasonably young and healthy of body, taking his ease without a care in the world.
Even the deliciously curved honey-tanned blond who was slowly undulating toward him, exuding animal invitation with every wriggle of her bikini, must have looked like heaven in immediate prospect for an observer becoming increasingly less casual as he anticipated inevitable developments in the lush, semi-tropical scene.
Such an observer could not have been more wrong in his conclusion had he tried.
In an immediate way, the blond was the crux of the pyramid of anxieties and downright fears that threatened to fall on the singer at any moment and pulverize him.
Alan watched her approach through half-closed eyes and reached for the thermos pitcher of vodka collinses that sat in coruscating sterling silver brightness atop the portable bar beside his beach chair, poured himself a refill and downed a hearty draught. He pretended not to see straw-haired Gloria drawing even closer.
He felt like a hungover small bird being stalked by a hungry leopard, a sparrow that had lost both will and ability to fly away to safety. Ever since the wrap-up party in the Eastside Plaza, Gloria had been on the prowl for him. Steed knew, of course that Alan had detested this girl on sight ... typically, Alan's rival and friend considered the whole thing a huge joke. He had obviously rigged the entire setup to leave the singer helpless in the hands of this predatory idiot-child from the South.
Alan's own Palm Springs manse was in the throes of a periodic reconstruction, which was why he was staying with Steed. His own entourage ... Lucky Winsted, Joe Link and Sally-Jo ... had scattered to enjoy a well-earned vacation. Stan Forman was off somewhere with the suitcases under his eyes, engaged in Machiavellian maneuvers to foil Irra Naismith's Machiavellian maneuvers to impede Alan's plans to star in the movie version of Metro pole.
Now Steed and his gang had departed for Hollywood, leaving Alan stranded with Gloria, it was an obvious put-up job. Alan had managed to keep clear of her the night before by half-feigning a drunkenness that was only half-pretended and had left his head throbbing and his body full of malaise beneath the coat of tan that gave it an illusion of magnificent health and well-being.
Now the moment of truth was at hand, Gloria parked her beautifully rounded bottom on the foot of his beach chair and brushed back her long hay=hued hair. Her anachronistic dark-brown eyes regarded him with a mixture of unabashed sexual hunger and shrewd suspicion that bordered on open dislike. He could read her like a book, of course. She hated him for putting her down in New York, both at the party and, afterward, with the American photographer, the pantberine muiatto girl ... what was her name? Maggi ... Maggi Burke?
Spoiled since infancy like so many uncommonly pretty girls, especially from the South, Gloria was determined to get whatever was denied her ... in this case, a duel with the celebrated Alan Clark prick. The longer it was denied her, the more insistent her hunger. He suspected she would try to hook him, would then give herself the satisfaction of dumping him flat on the pretext that he was a lousy lay.
This was not far from the truth ... which was that, at the moment, he was not a lay at all. Even if he loved the girl, which he definitely did not, he could not have raised a decent hard-on without the uremic administrations of Sally-Jo ... and Sally was away off in Fresno, doubtless having herself a ball without having to go to the bathroom on whoever had his prick inserted in her educated cunt.
Alan took another sip, wondering how long his kidneys could hold out, felt a shift of the beach chair beneath him as the girl moved ... then firm fingers were plucking the glass from his fist. He opened his eyes, feigned surprise at finding her there leaning over him, her big tits spilling out of her bikini top, her brown eyes burrowing into his. He said, "Hey! What the...?"
"Who you tryin' to fool?" she said, her lips parting in a pout that made them look twice as full as they were. The scent of jasmine enveloped him again.
Feigning greater drunkenness than he felt, he said, "Jesus! Why in hell haven't you changed that stinking perfume! You know it turns me off...."
"Ah don' think so, ... ah don't think my perfume turns you off. You know what ah think?"
"At the moment, sweetie," he replied, "I couldn't care less for what passes for thought in that rabbity little cranium of yours."
She ignored him, proceeded relentlessly...."Ah think you've had it with sex, Alan Clark." She paused, added as an afterthought, "At least with normal sex."
"You didn't think so when I screwed back in New York." He thought, Dammit, I'm on the defensive with this praline popsy.
The incident was hardly a proud one in his memory. He had deliberately fucked the beautiful girl when they were three to a bed back in the Eastside Plaza, not because he desired her madly but to humiliate Gloria for the scene she had made at the place with the piano bar.
Not that the girl had been bad fucking. Her responses had been glorious. Without closing his eyes, Alan could envision that memorable bed-session, which had lasted until after daylight, with this stinking bitch-mean oversexed little tart out in the cold and forced to masturbate for relief. All in all, it had been a big one.
But the aftermath had not been pleasant. Alan had hated himself for using an obviously fine girl so blatantly ... even though she had uttered not a word of complaint. He felt he must have put himself down in her eyes by demeaning her so ... and he did not like the feeling.
Now Gloria had inserted a set of long-taloned fingers inside the waistband of his brief swim trunks. Her straw hair fell forward over her face again as she said, "That's what ah mean, sugah. You can fuck a girl, but you can't fuck a normal piece of ass for nothin' no mo'."
She pushed his trunks before he could check her, pulled out his prick, held it in the palm of her hand, studying its flaccidity. Then she looked at him again, smiled enigmatically but viciously, said in a little-girl voice that reminded him of Sally-Jo, "See what ah mean?"
"You know I've had a lot to drink," he told her. Damn! he thought, I'm on the defensive again. "Sometimes it hits the best of us that way."
"An' you considah yourself the best?" There was derision in her drawl, "You're a long way from it with me, sugar. Why, ah'll make a bet...."
Her eyes narrowed and she slipped from the chair in an extravaganza of bobbing curves, knelt beside it and took his flagging manhood in her mouth. Feeling utterly helpless, Alan accommodated his body to her efforts. They were not, after all, in themselves unpleasant.
In performing fellatio, as he suspected in all other physical techniques of sex, the girl revealed great expertise. She sucked at him, she ran her tongue around the rim of his penis-head, she massaged it along the sensitive underside, she made her teeth chatter upward along his cock, giving the effect of a pneumatic drill that sent a chill of unexpected delight racing along his spine.
He felt a faint stir of sensual excitement in his loins, a partial reaction that served to lengthen his prick, causing Gloria to leap from her kneeling posture and straddle him. Her pubic hair bobbed up and down in front of him as she worked his penis into the soft, well-lubricated interior of her vagina and slid up and down with rotary screwdriver motions, seeking to add further life to his half-flaccid cock.
It worked ... up to a point. Thereafter, the alcohol Alan had imbibed in an effort to avoid just this sexual confrontation took charge. He was rigid as a thick branch and could diddle her endlessly ... but numbness and lassitude made orgasm impossible of attainment.
The ill-tempered blond worked out on him for what had to be almost an hour. Climax after climax sent her gasping and shuddering, flooding him almost like Sally-Jo. She kissed him, slobbering, she writhed and rotated, causing her unfettered boobs to fly and flap like large loose elephant's ears. She cursed him monotonously, slavering obscenities into his ears, into his lips even as she gripped them with her own.
He simply lay there, letting her do the work, thinking, the little bitch wanted it, she's got it, let her enjoy it. Jesus, look at her go! But after awhile it began to grow dull, even to hurt as the acids of her pussy juice, so long applied to the tender skin of his prick, abraded the skin.
Finally, he decided enough was enough. He pushed himself upright, taking it for granted she would let him go ... but the nymph continued to buck and grind, locking her arms tight around his shoulders, her legs around his waist. Their brief swimsuits had long since gone with the wind.
Jesus christ, this one's got to go! he thought as the ring of muscle within the lips of her vulva gripped his cock to prevent his pulling free of her. He let out a yelp, staggered, lost his balance and tumbled both of them into the pool. She squawked like a barnyard fowl as her rump hit the surface with an iridescent splash.
When they surfaced, sputtering, she was still clinging to him, still grinding her rump around his aching prick, regarding him through flat tendrils of water-dark long hay-hued hair with the madness of a naiad in heat making her dark eyes glitter insanely.
"Sorry, darling," he told her. "You get off here."
With a quick hard shove, he pushed her clear of him, her arms and legs unable to hold his water slippery skin any longer. She went under again, backwards, opening her mouth to utter something insulting just in time to get it full of pool water. By the time she recovered, Alan had his trunks back on and was turning to walk to the house.
"Don't say it hasn't been charming," he told her over his shoulder, "because it hasn't."
She gave vent to a thin screech of fury and scrambled out of the pool after him ... but he kept on moving away. Some noise behind him, some instinct perhaps, caused him to turn after taking half a dozen strides ... just in time to see the silver pitcher hurtling at him through the air with remarkable accuracy.
T
He ducked barely in time for it to clear his head, and come to earth with a thud ten feet beyond him, spilling its contents over the roll-on lawn. He turned again and waggled a reproving forefinger at her. Her mouth became a small letter o, uttering soundless obscenities. For once, Gloria appeared to be speechless.
Alan decided to let it go at that, hurried inside the low, plush pad, dived into some clothes, borrowed one of Steed's sports cars, a glittering turquoise-blue Maserati, and got the hell out. On impulse he headed for Hollywood. He had a few things to say to his erstwhile host ... and, besides, the skit he was due to perform on the morrow for the Top Ten on Saturday show with Steed would not suffer from a bit of extra rehearsal.
Extra rehearsal ... that was a laugh. He and Steed had appeared together so many times on so many different media that they seldom rehearsed at all, trusting to experience, compatibility and their nimble wits to pull them through anything that could happen on any stage. His turning up for the purpose would be a surprise to Steed, bless his black Italian comic-book heart, Alan thought ... and at least he had showed Steed's little surprise for him that he could still fuck her right out of the country if he wanted to....
He settled down to the long drive, a half-smile of temporary contentment curving upward the corners of his sensitive, well-cut mouth.
By the time he reached the barn of a Hollywood Moorish old movie theater that had been refurbished for the weekly Top Ten show, Alan was no longer smiling ... he was beginning painfully to wonder if his recent bouts with psychological impotency had not been replaced by an attack of satyriasis. The erection Gloria had brought on so skillfully and so energetically maintained simply would not go down."
Alan had heard of such a condition since somewhere in his early teens. Although he had been told that it could be exceedingly painful for those it afflicted, he had never quite believed it ... stories of victims beating their meat with a hammer in an agony-crazed effort to shatter an erection too-long maintained had always seemed too far out for credence.
But as the minutes, then the hours, ticked by without offering him a semblance of relief, he apologized silently to all the unknown victims of this strange malady for his disbelief.
It was simply too much in every sense of the words ... and what made it the more annoying was that Gloria, the little bitch he so detested, the tramp Steed had thrown his way as a sort of Rabelaisian practical joke, should have been the one to trigger it.
The hell of it was, he was alone. Ordinarily, he would simply have demanded a broad from Lucky or Stan ... or, if worst came to worst, he could slake himself with Sally-Jo. After all, that was what he paid her for. Under other circumstances, he could have asked Steed to loan him a portion of his phonebook-sized harem.
But not now. He didn't want Steed to know too much about him just then ... he might be moved toward another of his practical sight-gags ... and his own entourage was scattered to the several winds. So here he was, Alan Clark, desperately in need of a woman. Alan Clark, the long-term idol seven million females probably wanted to screw ... and he had not the slightest idea of how to go about relieving his plight without running the risk of getting into a jam.
It had all been done for him so long that he had completely lost the knack of getting a broad by himself!
When he reached the theater, it was even worse. He managed to get through the run-through without revealing his embarrassing condition, mostly by standing in back of pieces of furniture ... but the entire backstage area was awash with pneumatic little chorines and statuesque showgirls, all of them showing a lot more sleek soft female flesh than their abbreviated costumes covered.
Not until it was over, and a thin little man with thick-lensed glasses approached him, did he come up with an answer. The voice beneath the pair of spectacles said, "Gee, Mr. Clark, we didn't expect you here today. I'm Jim Davidson of AMC. Anything we can do for you?"
Of course ... the agency! During recent years, even his dealings with the management group which arranged his bookings and contracts had been conducted by remote control through Stan Forman. But who in hell did he still know there, know well enough to do a spot of urgently needed pimping for him?
He said, "Who's your chief, Jim?"
"Right now, I'm working under Mr. Horowitz. He's supposed to be personnel, but we all double in brass around AMC."
"Ah, yes," said Alan. "Good old AMC. Is it by any chance a Horowitz named Jake?"
"That's him," said the young hustler.
"C'est je,' said he knowin' the language," murmured Alan. Then, as Jim Davidson's eyebrows rose above the rims of his spectacles, "Could you get him for me?" Then, as the young man's eyebrows continued their march upward, "I mean on the phone, of course."
Then, when Jake came on, Alan said, "Jackie darling, this is Alan darling. I want you to get me a broad."
There had been a long moment of shocked silence, then, in hesitant tones, "What kind of a broad, Alan?"
"The usual kind, Jake. You know ... the proper ones and twos of everything. Medium rare, easy on the sauce ... plenty of mushrooms and truffles. Hell, man, you know the score."
And so it was arranged.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
So here she was, sitting in a strange but opulent room in a house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, waiting to be fucked by a man she had never met. Tanya lit a cigarette she didn't want, noted that her hand shook. Steady the Buffs! she thought. It's just going to bed with another man.
But of course it wasn't just going to bed with another man. If she really made it with Steed Bonnett, it could lead directly to Alan Clark ... and Alan was her goal. She recalled the orgy of the afternoon and evening before in the apartment she shared with Dee and shuddered. Her fixation that she was screwing her father had been so strong that it had shaken her almost apart. She didn't want to go to bed with Alan ... naturally or unnaturally. All she wanted was to be able to go to bed with whomever she chose without imagining herself to be fucking the real father whose identity she had so recently learned.
Somehow, if she could meet him, if she could win his acknowledgement of her existence, if she could develop some sort of father-daughter relationship with him, Tanya was convinced her frightening fixation would melt away.
So here she sat ... or rather paced the deep-pile fabric of the wall-to-wall carpet ... smoking a cigarette with shaking fingers and a catch in her breath and trying not to spill ashes on either the carpet or her new black velvet pants suit with the white-wool and silver-lame turtleneck jersey beneath.
Getting all dressed up merely to take off your clothes so a man can fuck you. From that point of view, the whole rigmarole seemed idiotic. But Mr. Horowitz had insisted she groom up for the occasion ... nor had he once mentioned her bedmate to-be by name. But Tanya had already decided on his identity, so it didn't matter. Steed Bonnett ... everything fitted in.
She ground out her cigarette in a cloisonn' ashtray and looked around for a drink to ease the catch in her throat. There was, she discovered, a well-stocked cellarette in an alcove just off the big room in which she sat ... as well-stocked as the back bar at The Dry Martini. As she poured herself a vodka collins, she recalled wistfully the nights she had spent with Phil Barrett, sitting on the piano bench with him and singing along, the deeper pleasures of excitements they had shared in the tumbled bed of his Murray Hill apartment.
It was, she realized with a sudden sadness, a nice relationship, one already vanished into the mists of memory, one she would never repeat with another man. She took a sip of her drink, saw the reflection of a man in the mirror behind the cellarette.
It was not Steed Bonnett at all ... it was Alan Clark, still wearing the casual sports clothes he had jumped into when he fled Steed's Palm Springs pad and the omnivorous Gloria earlier that day. Feeling like a suddenly fallen souffl', Tanya slowly turned to face him as he advanced toward her, studying her with the familiar quarter-smile twisting his lips.
His survey completed, he approached her, took the drink from her hand, then gripped both her hands in his, looked her over once more, said, "You'll do."
All at once, unreality took over for Tanya, and it became a dream sequence. She could no more have fought the seemingly inexorable series of events that followed than she could have teleported herself back to her apartment below the Strip. If ever a girl found herself helplessly in the grip of fate, it was she ... as he led her toward a softly lit, quietly opulent bedroom with a low, immensely broad bed whose sheets and coverings some invisible servant had already discreetly turned down.
He gestured toward a dressing room and, without a word, she moved in there and took off her clothes. When she returned, naked, Alan Clark, already barefoot, was in the act of peeling off his bright-colored sports jacket. She saw that he looked remarkably lean and fit, that the modest spread of curling brown hairs in the middle of his chest topped a flat belly laced with horizontal ridges of muscle.
He then unfastened the waistband of his slacks and let them drop to his ankles, where he stepped out of them ... and Tanya's eye was at once caught by his extraordinary state of readiness for the act of love. His celebrated prick curved proudly upward in a scimitar-like arc, rising out of a nest of brown curls that framed the heavy testicles beneath like plastic excelsior surrounding a pair of department-store Easter eggs.
As she watched, marveling at its purple-veined rigidity, he gripped it tightly in his right hand and an expression of relief, as if from mild pain, crossed his too-familiar face. A smile of something like boyish embarrassment flickered across his handsome features and caused her quick-frozen heart to melt.
He came close and put his arms around her and, automatically, she returned his embrace. When their lips met and their bellies pressed together, she felt the prod of his erect cock against the undercurve of her abdomen, felt it move upward in a leap as it stiffened and sprang to answering attention, although, inhibited by the deep tensions of the moment, her vulva failed to cream.
He said, "Jesus!" fervently, almost under his breath as their lips parted ... and then they were on the bed with him on top of her and the round tip of his heavy cock knocking at the dry gates of her portal of pleasure.
For a pain-ridden moment, she thought he was going to force his thickness into her unlubricated interior, but when he realized her condition, he half-smiled once more, lifted a hand to his lips and ran his tongue over fingers and palm. She felt a drop of saliva strike her belly and begin to trickle down her flanks as he anointed the tip of his penis before sliding it into her. Once the head was past the labia and the outer ring of muscles, once that gently prodding crown had passed her clitoris, Tanya felt her own floodgates release as if a logging jam had been removed.
She heard him sigh with relief as their juncture was complete, with his prick sliding on easily into her, further and further and further, until it felt to her that he was going to split her in two. She pulled him flat against her breasts, bent her knees on either side of his legs to give herself greater leverage, then let a sudden, unbearable wave of incredible rapture have its way with her.
Once more she exploded ... but at least she found herself gripped by no fantasy, no illusion that the man within her was somebody else. It was Alan Clark, her beloved father, and he was real and there and assisting her in creating a series of climaxes that made all her previous ecstasies seem very small beer indeed.
He was strong, he was savage, he was gentle ... above all, he was unbelievably adroit. From somewhere deep in her own libidinous subconscious, Tanya knew exactly how to give him pleasure and, in giving pleasure, to increase her own already overburdened organs of ecstasy.
She went winging off on the flights of exquisite delight, somehow understanding that this most sophisticated veteran of every amorous art and trick for the moment wanted only a straightforward old-fashioned fucking ... and she proceeded to give him just that. He was the gourmet, tired of pressed duck and meat served with foie gras and puff paste and truffle, the jaded diner-outer who craved only a simple cut of rare roast beef gravied in its own juices along with Yorkshire pudding.
He wanted plain fare, perfectly delivered, and at the moment her delirious desire matched his. She felt unendurable delight in the weight of his thrusting body upon her own, in the flattening of her breasts beneath the heavier cage of his ribs, in the rhythmic bounce of his balls against her outspread under cheeks.
She began to roll him as her own passion increased with his, and he responded with mightier thrusts, threatening to pierce the rear wall of her womb with the crown of his penis each time he drove deep, deep into her. She uttered a mindless cry as she felt the throb of his tormented cock against the velvety walls of her vagina, counterthrust upward until it seemed to her she was drawing all of him into her loving cup ... then clamped arms and legs tight around him as she felt the violent bucking of his mighty phallus when orgasm approached ... by then, how many times she had come herself she was never to know, for her climaxes had succeeded one Another so rapidly as to seem almost continuous.
Then he pushed further into her in a final urgent thrust, and she felt the spurt of his semen far, far up inside of herself. Again and again he spurted, and she rejoiced in the overwhelming thought that she had at last attained freedom from her terrifying fixation in the sharing of his seed in the very fact and act of ultimate incest.
His emission ended, his erection wilted rapidly, leaving Tanya hanging higher than the proverbial kite ... but here again his experience and instinctive kindness came to her aid as he applied knowing fingers to the area his prick had so lately vacated. Unexpectedly, he cradled her close in his arms and kissed her gently, their lips melding touchingly in a medley of shared sweat.
Incest or not, Tanya loved this man with a warmth and depth she had never before felt for any living creature. It might be all wrong in the eyes of the world ... but there could be no questioning of their rightness together in the act of love.
She returned his kiss with an enthusiasm that seemed to startle him, for he drew back a little and stared at her as if truly seeing her for the first time. He said, "You're very lovely ... and I'm very grateful."
"You're grateful?" she asked, surprised. "How do you think I feel!"
There, she thought sorrowfully, went her kooky sense of humor again ... but understanding flashed in his worldly blue eyes and he laughed softly, then said. "Let's pass that ... but you just did more for me than you'll probably ever know." He reached to tousle her damp dark hair, then paused and frowned down at her thoughtfully, added, "Damn! You look awfully familiar. I've seen you somewhere before, haven't I?"
Tanya rolled over on her belly, thrust her buttocks high, said, "Now you've seen me behind, too."
He slapped her arse playfully, rolled her over, said, "I'm serious. Where the hell have we met?" She said, "I work for AMC ... or didn't Mr. Horowitz tell you?"
He shook his head. "No," he said. "Not there ... I haven't been to the agency for years. "No...." His face clouded, then cleared. "New York," he said. "When I was there last March."
"I didn't think you noticed me," she told him. "Why not? You're one hell of a lovely broad."
"You were otherwise engaged ... very busily, I believe."
He clapped a hand to his forehead, peered at her under it. "You were the girl at the cocktail joint. You were damned good, too. I remember, I sent you a bill."
"I lit a cigarette with it," she replied.
"For Christ's sake, why?" He was openly astonished.
"A-because you didn't listen...."
"But I did listen ... you and that boy did the Sally number...."
"B-because I didn't need the loot."
"If you didn't need it," he said, looking bewildered, "What in hell are you doing here?"
"Let's just say I was drafted," she said.
"Old General Hershey should have had Jake's taste," he muttered. "I still don't get it."
"You got rid of it instead," she said, wriggling in the moist mess of her bottom. "If I don't get to a john ... "
"Forgive me." What most surprised Tanya about him was his politeness. He took her to the most elaborate bathroom she had ever seen, sat her down on her first bidet, showed her how it worked. Afterward, she took a shower, as she had while she was flushing her bottom out. When she emerged, he had laid out a half-length blue silk Chinese mandarin jacket over the back of the chair. She donned it, saw that it came barely below her pussy, that she looked adorably naughty wearing it.
She thought, I suppose I ought to be suffering all the tortures of guilt ... but I'm not, I'm having a ball. It occurred to her also that she ought to be feeling bone tired ... but so keyed up was she that she might have emerged from a ten-hour sleep.
When she got outside, Alan was sitting on the edge of the love-rumpled bed, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a dark red robe that contrasted pleasantly with the brilliant blue of his eyes.
He said, "There's a lot about this I don't understand, but I'm in no mood to look a gift filly like you in the mouth. Come on ... I want to hear you sing again."
This time, he led her to a music room complete with a Steinway concert grand and every conceivable kind of electronic equipment. He sat down at the piano, riffed a few chords, said, "How'd that
Sally thing go?"
She tried to get into the medley, but failed, said, "I guess I need Phil to do it right. After all, we worked it out together."
He studied her intently, apparently understood that she was suddenly uptight, launched into one of his own favorites, a ballad that had sold a couple of million records as he sang it ... Be Careful, That's My Heart.
Even without all the magic of modern recording, the Alan Clark voice, heard thus intimately, caused Tanya's entire internal equipment to leap convulsively as he launched into the opening phrases. And she relaxed as he sang, relaxed until her usual pert to-hell-with-everybody nerve restored itself. When he had finished, she joined him on the bench, as she was accustomed to joining
Phil Barrett, pushed him to the left with a gentle pressure of her hip and took over the keyboard.
She said, "That's not the way I heard it," laughed up into his inquiring eyes and began, "Be careful, that's my watch ... It's not my heart you're holding, it's my watch...!" She had worked the parody out two years before, when she and Phil first began their relationship. Alan Clark's launching into this particular number seemed too coincidental entirely to be accepted as mere coincidence.
She sang it through, and by the time the final phrase was finished, he was doubled over the keyboard, close to hysterics. He lifted a face stained with tears of laughter, finally said, "Who the hell writes your material?"
"Oh ... I did most of the words. Phil rigged the music around it."
"You can't be for real...." he marveled. "You can't be! Why the hell haven't we gotten together before this?"
"Your fault," she told him. Somehow she couldn't bring herself to call him darling although her whole being ached to convey the joyous depths of her affection without let or stay. Then, "Have you any idea how hard you are to reach?"
"I'm sorry." He sounded as if he meant it, holding her hands in his, looking into her eyes. Then he said, "You know, my dear, I don't even know your name."
"Tanya," she said. After a moment's hesitation, she decided against giving her last name. He might hook up Trowbridge with Ellen and his long-lost summer love, might be shrewd enough to nose out their true relationship ... and just then, the truth was the last thing she wished out between them.
He said, "All right, Tanya. If you want to be secretive, I shan't pry ... because I want to go to bed with you too much."
"All right," she dropped her eyes and her voice, hoping to mask the eagerness that leapt within her at the sound of his words. Somehow, she understood him perfectly. The first time they fucked had been because of something, or somebody else ... it had not been a matter of simply the two of them. She sensed with heart-fluttering excitement that this time things were going to be very different.
How can you improve on perfection? she wondered.
But they did. He slid into her as easily as Phil Barrett despite the larger dimensions of his dong ... and once joined, they rolled over and lay on their sides, locked together with their arms around one another and her legs close about his waist, her heels against the cheeks of his rump, their genitals exquisitely interspliced, exchanging lingering little kisses with their lips and tongues.
At last, with the tide of pressure building up slowly inside her beyond stemming, Tanya moved her cunt ever so slightly, gushing inside at the friction along her vaginal walls, at the increased pres sure upon her clitoris. His response was as small and controlled as hers, and it brought an increased countermove, which caused him to withdraw until only the very tip of his cock brushed the lips of her vulva.
"My God!" she gasped in torment, fishing frantically with her cunt for the elusive rod she so desperately needed within her. "You're killing me."
"That comes later," he said through suddenly tightened lips as he plunged all the way into her, lifting her left hip with a clutching hand to widen her entrance and make penetration deeper still. Then they were off to the races....
He rolled her over on top of him, clamped a hand on each of her buttocks and controlled her action as no one had ever controlled it before. The more she struggled to rid herself of his constrictive grip, to let her cunt roll and grind as it would, the more unbearably exquisite became the song of her strong, sleek young body.
She struck at his forearms, but he continued to hold her, maintaining his own slow, deep, relentlessly steady pace while she gasped and fluttered and died a dozen times. She knew she was screaming in an orgasmic frenzy but had no idea what she said, nor the slightest control over any part of herself. She was in heaven, she wanted to die, she would die if it did not last forever.
It didn't, of course, although, for a while, it seemed so to Tanya. In a brief return to sanity, she became aware that she must be behaving like a Fury from some legend of Ancient Greece, her dark hair flying, her breasts bouncing in every direction, her lips mouthing obscenities that made no sense at all.
Then, again, she felt the unmistakable throbbing stir of the beautiful cock on which she squatted, impaled, and uttered a moan wrenched from her vitals as she settled herself squishily down upon it to receive once more its joyous message of liquid life.
When at last it was over, they slept like an innocent pair of babes in the Hollywoods ... and when Tanya awoke, long after daylight, he was still slumbering peacefully.
Only then did the full enormity of what she had done, of what she had allowed to happen, sweep over her. Feeling like a criminal, or at least like a complete moral leper, she stole silently into her black velvet pants suit, brushed her hair into some sort of order and crept out of the long, low, luxurious mansion. No one tried to stop her ... in fact, she saw nobody at all. Her little used car was parked where she had left it, and she got it started silently and drove off toward the Strip.
Why, she wondered bitterly, did a love so right have to be so wrong? As unusual, the song lyric that stated the reverse had everything ass-backward, had everything ass-backward, had. To hell with that, she thought. And what in hell was a panoe?
She was going to have to get out of there fast ... out of Hollywood and anywhere else where she might be recognized. Up, up and away!
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Alan concluded the Top Ten broadcast, he drove directly back to his home in the hills. It had been a long and exhausting day ... or would have been exhausting had he not been atingle with anticipation of Tanya being there awaiting him, as she had the night before. The show had been a triumph ... due to the miraculous renewal of youth this miraculous young beauty had brought him.
It had been many long sex-ridden years since any broad had turned him on so dynamically ... broad, no. Not for this one, even if the agency had sent her over for casual commercial sexual purposes. This was a woman, a girl, a marvelously vital creature who had set his every nerve-end to singing. Nor was it merely the magic of her body.
There was magic in her soul as well, in her voice, in her slightest expression, in the way she moved, in the way she talked, in the way she sang beside him at the piano.
He could barely wait.
But when he reached the house, she was not there ... despite the fact that he had left a call for her before he took off for the studio.
He felt his resurrected youth drain from him when Lucky gave him the word. It was as if someone had pulled a plug and all the magic, all the excitement so wondrously reclaimed, drained out through his toes.
"It's no go, Coach," said the golden-haired homosexual. "She took off ... job, apartment, the works. Jake doesn't know where she went. The broad she lives with doesn't know. Nobody knows...."
"You don't have to be so fucking smug about it, you bastard!" snapped Alan. "Find her!"
"To hear is to obey, your highness." Lucky salaamed and moved toward the telephone. Alan considered decking him ... whenever Alan showed symptoms of actually falling in love, Lucky lived in obvious panic. Any clinkers in the path of heterosexual romance caused him equally obvious delight.
But the singer was too brought down to take violent action. He felt as if his drawn carcass had been hung on a meat hook awaiting the ministrations of some butcher off screen. As Lucky got on the phone, he could not bear the sound of his voice. He wandered aimlessly into the music room where he and the girl had enjoyed their adlib duet so hugely. Joe Link, more than ever a milk chocolate Buddha, was stretched out in an armchair, a leg over one arm. He was listening to a playback of the tape of Tanya and Alan's duet, did not note him employer's entrance until it was over.
Then he said, "Who is she?"
Alan tried to shrug it off. "Just a broad," he said. "Why?"
Link shrugged, rose with a grunt, set the tape for a playback, ran through it again. Alan listened, enchanted, reliving that portion of the too-short time when he had been alive once more. As Tanya broke into her parody of Be Careful ... a second time, the usually impassive ex-trumpeter's pear-shaped face creased in a smile. He chuckled, said, "Who writes her material?"
"She does." It never occurred to Alan that the girl might have been lying.
Joe listened intently to the Sally songs, nodding now and then as musical and vocal phrases pleased him. Only twice did he frown, both times when the piano was at fault. This time, when it ended, he sat up and rubbed his pink palms together.
"You been cheating," he told Alan in his rumbling basso. "You got yourself a potential gold disc right on that tape."
"You got to be kidding!" said Alan. "You're putting me on! The kid's not even a pro." r
"Maybe not ... but she's so right, man. She's been listening right and she sings right. Listen how she handles this riff...." He set it back, re-played a brief four-bar break during which she had eschewed words for pure vocalization in jazz phrases, turned it off once more at the break's conclusion.
"It's not just what she does," he added, pondering. "It's a quality of tone, a sound thing. It's like you and she were cut from the same hunk of meat."
"Come on!" Alan was stunned. There definitely was something going there, something he had not been aware of while he and Tanya were fooling around at the piano.
"You sound better than you have in years, too," said the black.
"I wasn't even trying to sing," Alan protested. "We were just horsing around."
"Maybe you been trying too hard lately," said Joe. He stared at the player, said, "It's a good thing you keep the tape on automatic. Otherwise, you'd have missed the whole thing. We put the right piano under the voices ... I'll see to that ... and you've got yourself a winner." He paused, added, "You better get that kid under contract, whoever she is. You need her, boy."
"And you ain't whistling Dixie," said Alan. He looked around as Lucky entered the room, said, "Well...?"
"Well ... nothing," replied the exquisite young homosexual. "Maybe one thing ... she left an envelope with your name on it in her apartment. Her roommate just got back and found it."
"Well, get it, for Christ's sake!"
"Don't get your drawers in an uproar," said Lucky with a wriggle of his razor-lean fanny. "The roommate's on her way with it now."
When Dee Larkin arrived, big, bouncy, rusty haired, obviously in a state of high excitement, Alan Clark was pacing the carpet in a fever of impatience. He took the envelope, told Lucky to take care of the girl, adjourned to the undesired privacy of his bedroom to open it. Whatever the girl had to say, he didn't want the others to see his reactions to it.
Inside the envelope were two notes, folded around a pair of hundred-dollar bills. He read the first letter after tossing the money on the bedspread, the hastily scrawled note obviously written by her. It went....
Darling You'll have to believe me when I tell you I didn't really expect things between us to turn out as they did. The enclosed letter you wrote my mother a long time ago should explain my present behavior, even if it cannot excuse what I permitted to happen last night. But, damn it, I loved it and I love you very much.
Please don't try to follow me. If it seems at all possible, I'll be in touch with you later on. Love, Tanya T. (for Trowbridge).
Alan re-read it, totally baffled, until he scanned the other note, the letter he had written so long ago in such bitterness to a dazzling, brittle, beautiful blond who had betrayed a much younger version of himself, Alan Clark, to marry a man offering status and security he could not then hope to match.
Then, as he realized what had happened, the sky fell in on him. A kaleidoscopic scramble of wild thoughts and memories rolled through his brain ... of Ellen's hot, wet cunt grinding into his pelvis the night Tanya was conceived ... in a canoe drawn up a tiny reed-covered islet in a New Jersey lake, with the stars close above them and the mosquitoes closer still ... of Tanya's beauty and utter abandon in his bed, in his arms, only the night before ... and, annoyingly, of the blond bitch Gloria, sucking fucking him fruitlessly in a fury of dislike on the beach chair beside Steed's Palm Springs pool ... even more annoyingly, a line from an old burlesque-Hillbilly ditty that ran, I'm my own grandpa....
His next conscious awareness-how long after reading Tanya's message he had no idea-was of Sally-Jo, naked, her little pointed tits bobbing over him as she finished removing his clothes, of her tight little mouth seeking to revive his flaccid prick, of the familiar feel of her inner thighs straddling his pelvis while she tucked it into her at half-mast ... of suddenly hitting up in a frenzy of self disgust ... of hurling her to the carpet in a mixmaster of whirling arms and legs and tits and humiliation.
He pulled himself together for a while after that, enough to call off the search for Tanya. He gave a disturbed Dee Larkin the two bills Tanya had returned with the letters and sent the girl packing. He brushed aside Joe Link, who wanted something, told Lucky Winsted to go fuck himself, tried to get drunk and failed when his stomach rebelled.
Alan was still awake, after a fashion, when Stanley Forman turned up the next morning to breakfast with him. He was still working with Byzantine adroitness and lack of scruple to obtain from Irra Naismith the film rights to Metropole, although the pat was proving even more devious than his intricate intellect had foreseen.
"Okay, Alan, that's how it stands," he said, peering at his employer over the bags beneath his eyes.
"So what do you want from me?" Alan asked.
"Do we go ahead or not?" the manager countered. "If we do, it's gonna cost us. If we don't, it's still gonna cost us. It's your red wagon, babe...." A pause, then, with mounting concern: "Jesus, Alan, you look like you're half dead."
Alan tried to grin, didn't make it, said, "I guess maybe I am half dead at that, Stan-boy...."
With that, he blacked out.
* * *
Back in New York, Tanya slid onto the piano bench at The Dry Martini and picked up the chorus of the song Phil Barrett was playing. He joined in without looking at her and there was a rustle of applause from the tables as they resumed their long-interrupted duet.
Not until it was over, did they speak. Then Phil, half-handsome, all-attractive, rested his fingers on the keys and said, "Are you really back, darling?"
"I'm really back ... if you'll have me."
His eyes were all the affirmative she needed, and she riffed into an introduction for It's Been So Long. Again, he picked up the theme, and they were off on one of their most enjoyable sessions together. They kept at it until closing ... neither customers nor management would let them break it up ... and then, once again, she was snuggling against him in a taxi, her tongue twined with his, her free hand kneading the stiffness of the sweetly familiar prick she felt beneath his tight-fitting trousers.
As they undressed in the bedroom of Phil's Murray Hill pad, sudden panic gripped Tanya. She had not had a man since her sheet-top confrontation with Alan Clark and the guilt that had ridden her since was still throbbing deep within her. It occurred to her that the strange fixation of being possessed incestuously by her father might have been aggravated rather than cured by the ritual of sex.
For a moment, she hesitated, her teeth chattering ... but then Phil was caressing her, holding her nakedness close to his, teasing her, thrilling her, rousing her beyond the point of no return with his knowledge of her body and its erotic secrets.
His lips plucked at her nipples before flattening them, his palm caressed her buttocks before spearing her arsehole with a wickedly knowledgeable forefinger, the while his elegantly long lean prick probed at her navel.
Then the moment was upon them, and they half walked, half-tumbled to the bed, not bothering to open it, lying atop the tufted spread. Tanya's legs opened automatically, and the knob of his phallus briefly caressed the already creaming lips of her vulva. She thrust and wriggled upward toward this tantalizing treat, just as he thrust forward and down and slid into her all the way to the bottom.
He said, "Oh, Jesus, darling...." and Tanya was beyond coherent response as quick rapture seized her and had its way with her. She rolled and ground and thrust and clung and creamed until it seemed that she must flood all of Manhattan ... she came and came and came again, and again, and again. When Phil wilted after his second orgasm, she closed her cunt tightly around his waning cock and restored it to a life she could not live without just then.
It was a night of sheer sensual glory for both of them ... and not once did the vision of Alan Clark possessing her come between her and the lover she was truly with. The fact rendered her lovemaking all the madder, all the more joyous and fraught with delight.
She was home free!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
One deliriously love-happy week later, as Tanya and Phil wrapped up a jazz treatment of Jim Webb's This Time, Phil rested his fingers on the keys and said, "For Christ's sake, honey, look who just caught us."
Following his gaze, Tanya saw an immense black man seated in one of the wall banquettes with a fair-haired man whose back was to the entertainment. Puzzled, she said, "Who's he?"
"That's Joe Link," said Phil. "Now why in hell would he want to catch us?"
Tanya blinked. Joe Link ... one of her jazz idols since she first became an addict of the idiom ... one of the great trumpeters of all time ... a man whose records she had listened to ecstatically, playing them muffled after curfew in her various boarding school cubicles ... a genius whose active reign had been ended by the Rock revolution before she had had the opportunity to hear him live.
Link said something to the blond man with him and the latter turned around to stare directly at Tanya with piercing onyx-and-topaz eyes ... eyes whose perforating impact she would never forget.
"Oh, Jesus!" she whispered fervently. She knew, with sickening certainty, what these two men's presence meant, even if Phil did not. She had fled the Hollywood scene in panic after her incestuous night with Alan Clark ... but the Hollywood scene had opted to come after her. More specifically, Alan had come after her in the person of his agent ... the exquisitely dressed faggot with the pale yellow hair and the extraordinary eyes who had escorted her from the Eastside Plaza penthouse the night she had vainly tried to crash her father's party.
The manager approached them then, said, with a nod toward the newcomers, "These gentlemen want to buy you a drink."
Before Tanya could pull herself together and offer a coherent refusal, Phil was escorting her across the floor to the banquette where Nemesis sat. The exquisite homosexual rose at their approach, introduced Joe Link, then himself as Lucky Winsted. After drinks were ordered, he said, "Joe, here, has been looking for you, Miss Trowbridge."
"What is this?" Phil asked, looking from Tanya to Joe Link and back again in undisguised astonishment. "Honey, you didn't tell me you did any performing while you were on the Coast."
"I didn't...." said Tanya, equally thunderstruck.
"You mean you didn't cut some songs with Alan Clark a week ago Monday night?" Joe Link asked in a gentle rumbling basso.
Tanya felt herself blush and hated it. Then she shrugged inwardly and said, "We sang a little ... but we didn't put anything on tape."
"You just think you didn't. Mr. Clark's house is wired for sound from roof to foundations." The black man paused and regarded them both thoughtfully, added, "We'd like to run a platter on it ... but it's going to take a lot of work."
"You mean, everything that happens in Mr. Clark's house is recorded?" The moment she uttered the artless question, Tanya knew she had brodied. The cockery behind Lucky Winsted's all-knowing eyes was briefly apparent, and there was a long, pregnant silence until Joe Link got her off the hook.
He said, "Everything in the music room, Miss Trowbridge. Some of Mr. Clark's biggest records have had their origin there, just as casually as your session there that night."
"B-but...." Tanya protested. "We didn't really sing anything. And I'm just an amateur."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," said Lucky Winsted. The edge of his hatred cut through, bare, sharp and ugly.
Link quelled him with a glance and turned to Phil. It was Tanya they had come to New York for, but after hearing the two of them perform, Joe Link felt Phil was the man to play the piano for the recording when it came time to mix the various sounds that went into every modern record.
"You've got a fine rolling left hand, Mr. Barrett," he concluded. "May I ask who your models were?"
"Oh...." said Phil. "I think my mother must have been frightened by Jimmy Johnston while she was carrying me. And I've been a Willie the Lion nut since I was in knee pants."
"It figures," said the black musician. "You couldn't have done much better."
Suddenly Tanya had had enough. She said, "If Alan Clark wants me so badly, why doesn't he come after me himself."
"Mr. Clark doesn't know about it," said Link. "Mr. Clark is ... ill," said Lucky Winsted. "We-that is, Joe-wants to do this for him. He figures there's nothing a hit record won't cure."
"What's wrong with him?" Tanya had to know with urgency as unexpected as it was alarming.
"Nothing specific," said Winsted. "His physician calls it a mild breakdown."
"Has he asked for me?"
It was another boo-boo. The contempt with which Lucky Winsted regarded her made her skin crawl. After a long, insulting moment, he said, "No, darling ... not yet."
That morning, instead of returning to his pad and another bed session together, Tanya and Phil found themselves on a jet with Joe and Lucky, winging southwestward across the continent. A lemon-hued man with immense bags under his eyes met them at Los Angeles International Airport and looked at Tanya carefully, then at Phil with surprise.
"Who is he?" he asked.
"The piano," said Lucky Winsted.
They were driven directly to the recording studio. There, after signing various papers shoved under her nose by Stan Forman, Tanya found herself with nothing to do but sit by for wild line pickups while the others sweated out the assembling of what they hoped would be a hit record. Phil had been through it before, but for Tanya it was a first time and an education.
Not until it was over, exhaustingly late in the evening, and they were being driven to Alan Clark's house, did Phil remark, "You realized you signed our futures away to Stanley Forman when you signed those contracts, don't you?"
Tanya was beyond caring. She said, "I thought it was just for the one shot ... besides, is that bad?"
"Probably not," said Phil. "But it's sure going to make things different." A pause, then, "I knew what you and I just found was too good to last ... but I hate to see it go."
"Does it have to go?" All at once, Tanya was concerned, not merely at the prospect of inevitably losing her trusted bedmate but over the fact that she did not really love him enough to mind as much as she should.
"Probably," he replied, putting a hand far up her thigh under her short skirt and squeezing her flesh warmly. "Not necessarily ... but it's a nine-to-one shot we lose."
"Shit! I'm sorry...." Tanya whispered, but even as she kissed him, her mind was leaping ahead ... not far ahead and career-wise but immediately and sex-wise ... to her second meeting with Alan Clark.
* * *
Alan was lying naked atop his huge bed, waiting for Sally-Jo, hoping against hope that this time it would be different. Now that he had recovered a little from the shock of discovery that he had royally fucked his own beautiful daughter, he needed to be laid as never before in his life.
The hell of it was, he couldn't do it ... not since the lovely and horrifying experience of that Monday night he was never going to forget, not without Sally-Jo's fetishist ritual, not without her urine fertilizing his prick. He had tried twice, both times with broads who had never failed to turn him on. Both times without success.
Since then, he had not dared. It would do his sex-idol image little good if word were to get around that the great replenisher of women could no longer perform as a stud. He felt like the hero of a parody on a Wagnerian opera, a hero who had brought his world crashing down on his own head. It was more Greek tragedy, with the powerhouse incest theme running through it ... or Greek black comedy, since only his pecker, not his life, had been destroyed.
But without his pecker, what was he? A has-been, a man who could no longer make the scene in which he had starred so triumphantly, so confidently, for more than twenty years. Talk about chicks coming home to roost.
Sally-Jo entered. As usual without a word, she slipped out of the shorts and halter that were her only garments. As usual, her pert little bottom rotated provocatively when she went to the closet, pulled out the rubber mattress, inflated it.
Ritual, ritual, ritual.
It had been an accident the first time, of course. Both Alan and Sally-Jo, at that time a minor film performer more noted for her sexpertise than any acting talent, had been blind, silly, stinking drunk in a Malibu beach house he had rented for the summer. They had fucked themselves foolish, but both wanted more.
Alan had proved unable to rise to the occasion ... in itself nothing to be concerned over. In thirty hours, he had literally run up a score ... twenty times. Now Sally-Jo, the mindless sex automaton, wanted to make it twenty-one. She had worked over him, rimming him to semi-erection, only to have him die on the vine.
Finally, in desperation, she had climbed athwart him and tucked his flagging prick into her still brimming cunt. It had hurt him and he had gripped her waist, seeking to dislodge her hungry labia that seemed to be strangling his prick at the base ... intending to get her off. She had refused to be dislodged, laughing her idiotic baby laugh and locking her legs under his buttocks. He had tickled her ribs and it happened.
She had laughed like a baby, giggled, howled, lost control, her stomach muscles jumping in laughter and his reaction had been an erection as potent as the first time they had fucked at the beginning of that torrid weekend.
That was how it had started. On another occasion, some weeks later, when sexual fatigue had rendered Alan ineffective, Sally-Jo had whispered a suggestion in his ear ... and he had taken her up on it ... and again it had worked. Thereafter, whenever he felt impotence close upon him, he had summoned her. Finally, of course, he had put her on his payroll as special personal manager.
Stan Forman had raised hell, of course, but in her way Sally-Jo had proved useful at running the singer's complex household. She had quickly become part of the accepted scene. Alan had never told anyone what her real importance was ... he had dared not. Nor had he dared permit the dead faced doll to run around loose ... not with what she knew about him.
Now, watching Sally-Jo gravely set about her duties, he wondered for the first time what she thought about the strange role she had come to play in his life ... certainly one far stranger than she had ever played on screen. He had never before wondered, for the simple reason that Sally-Jo seldom gave indication of having any thoughts at all upon abstract matters.
He began to wish that she would approach her chore with even a trace of warmth.
He felt the liquid warmth of her mouth, gently, easily working her tongue around his cock in slow, subtle motions, while her fingers played lightly with his testicles and encircled the base of his phallus.
He extended a hand to caress the round curves of her buttocks as she worked on him orally, closing his eyes and trying to imagine that this was another woman working on him, one who would stir him to fierce hot passion, who would cause him to rise to his full height and plunge into her willing dancing cunt and there make sport with her until she cried out for surcease.
He watched a parade of amorous beauties cross his inner eye ... blond, brunette, brownette, redheaded ... of all shapes and colors and sizes, a gallery of odalisques any sultan of Turkey would have envied in his own garden of memories. But they flickered past too rapidly for Alan to concentrate on any one of them.
Suddenly, he was back at the Springs, and Gloria was goading him into passionate response. He dismissed this unpleasant image with an effort, let his mind go blank, again found himself in the canoe, long ago, drawn up under the stars on the reed-covered islet on the New Jersey lake ... with Ellen Rogers pushing herself close around his triumphant cock, opening herself wide within to absorb the spurting stream of his life-giving semen, the semen that had sparked the creation of....
As Sally-Jo, with the expertise of long practice, settled her cunt around his half-aroused prick, as she sought to restore his full virility by rapid corkscrew thrusts, the vision of the Monday night of a week before returned with appalling clarity.
All at once, it was not Sally-Jo he was embracing but vivid, passionate, beautiful Tanya Trowbridge, the one woman he could not afford thus to envision in such a role. His manhood returned with ferocious triumph. His prick seemed to snap to attention, forcing its way further up Sally-Jo's cunt than it had in years.
He seized her buttocks in a ferocious double grip and began plunging her up and down upon the gigantic maypole of erectile flesh upon which she hung impaled. He heard her cry out, first in alarm, then in rhythmic orgasmic tones as he rammed himself upward and into her with savage onslaughts that framed the tip of his prick with the provocative flanges of her womb.
He pulled her flat down upon him and kissed her nipples until they stood straight up, stiff and firm, he caught her lips with his own and crushed them, his tongue leaping into her throat. He felt a giant shudder run through her as she climaxed with urgent little calls of love.
Not so fast, he thought. Make it last ... make it last! His pleasure was so great that he wished only to prolong it indefinitely. He lifted the girl's squirming rump until it was all but clear of him, contained its frantic dippings and bobbings while she sought, close to frenzy, to regain the sword of her delight, then dropped her down on it hard, enjoying the squishy sound of her free-flowing juices as their hairs met with an audible crunch.
He tightened his anus to delay his own climax and continued to fuck her with slow, deep-penetrating strokes, causing her to gasp and squirm and struggle for freedom in a bout she wanted only to lose. He rolled her under him and pushed her thighs back upon her chest and enjoyed the spectacle of his own cream-dripping cock as it emerged and replunged into the very center of her hairy bottom with its two sets of lips and holes. The whole area, like his prick, was becoming white with the vehemence of her pussy juice.
Finally, when he had enjoyed her to his full, he permitted climax to approach, spiraling into her more fiercely than before, reveling in the splashy noises of their savage collisions at the conclusion of each stroke. He wriggled her arse as he entered her, then began to roll her beneath him ... to a frantic random recollection that what they were doing together was, in truth, the origin of the phrase "rock and roll" on which so much of modern pop music was reared.
But never as good as this ... he thought and returned to a more animal level as he bent his entire being to the matter of bringing them both to unbearable climax together. He felt the first stirrings of orgasm deep in the roots of his scrotum, plunged once, twice, three times more as it mounted and moved outward with his sperm, then drove himself into her all the way and felt her lock herself around him as they rolled together on the rubber mattress in a frenzy of utter abandon.
For the moment, all the universe was encompassed with their orgasm ... his and Tanya's. He sent spurt after spurt of semen into her womb, felt the rubbery slickness of it surrounding his cock the instant he came, making it difficult not to slip out of her completely as he withdrew for a final thrust ... so he made it and held it there, still deep within her, enjoying the post-climactic wrigglings of her lush, lovely body as she came slowly down from the heavenly cloud atop which he had maintained her for so long....
Slowly, his vision began to clear and a strange and horrible transformation took place in the girl he had so joyously and completely fucked ... as if a studio special effects department were performing its horrid magic in the climactic moments of a horror movie.
The dark hair of her head lost its natural luster and became dry and brittle, the result of too many thousands of hours spent in a beautician's chair, being treated with harmful dyes and the damaging heat of the dryer. The lush and lovely young body underwent a metamorphosis ... a sea-change from the beautifully fleshed free curves of youth to the diet-and-massage-maintained aging flesh of a Hollywood broad who had been on the sex circuit a good many years too long. The breasts seemed to shrink before his eyes, the pelvic curves to lose their lovely arcs and become just another woman's rump and genital area....
The full-lipped, passionately responsive young face with the luminous dark-blue eyes and sensitive bone structure beneath the satin flesh became a meaningless triangle of plastic skin in which meaningless features were dotted not with any purpose or design but because they were required for seeing, for smelling and breathing, for talking and tasting ... merely for the mechanics of existence.
The mouth he so loved to kiss took on a thin-lipped baby pout, and from it came not the lovely lilting feminine voice with which he had made music but a reedy, nasal baby twang that said, "For shit's sake, what happened to you? You blow your top or something?"
He made a sudden move to escape, but she locked her arms and legs around him once more and he was suddenly weak in the cage of her limbs, a prisoner of the sex he had so cavalierly exploited throughout his adult life. "Come on, baby," she cooed. "That was real kicky. Baby wants more." He did his best to pull clear, but the action involved only served to betray him. The cock that had stubbornly refused to give for more than a week now refused to quit ... and Sally-Jo's wrigglings were artfully contrived to prevent it from flagging. She ground up against him as orgasm quickly reclaimed her ... ground him so hard that he could almost feel the hairs of her pussy cutting into his flesh like steel wool, "God dammit...!" he began, but then she did something incredible and the unbearable, unspeakable horror returned ... he was no longer fucking Sally-Jo, he was fucking Tanya ... Tanya, his own daughter, the one woman he could not afford to fuck if he wished to retain his sanity.
While the illusion held him in its grip, there could be neither thought nor hope of escape ... he was trapped as completely as if he were in a true cage, which in a way he was. He gave vent to a mournful groan as Sally-Jo vanished completely, to be replaced by the beautiful young girl who was not there, who could never be there ... never again.
He made no effort to hold back his climax this time ... but climax was long in coming and when it did was wholly, soul-shatteringly complete. He discovered that they had rolled over in the course of the action, that the girl was once again on top, rolling around on his prick like a belly dancer as she completed her own orgasm, her lower lip held tightly in her teeth.
Then she leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders.
Again, it was no longer Tanya but Sally-Jo, fulfilling her paid-for role.
He looked to the door and there was Tanya Trowbridge looking down at them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tanya thought, for God's sake, why must I see this! She caught a glimpse of his anguished eyes, flipped her father a salute, said, "Hel-lo dere." After closing the door, she turned to Lucky Winsted, whose black-and-gold eyes gleamed at her with malicious triumph, said, "You are a bitch, aren't you?"
He lowered his eyes modestly, flicked a bit of imaginary dust from his immaculate cuff, said, "It isn't always easy ... but I try."
Had she not been so shocked and disgusted by the spectacle Lucky had so adroitly led her to, she might have laughed. As it was, she read the malevolent homosexual with sudden, complete insight. Why, she thought, the poor little creep is in love with Alan!
She felt almost flattered that Lucky should have spotted her on sight as a threat to whatever devious little schemes he was entertaining to win his heart's desire ... after all, Alan had long been a target for the most attractive and sophisticated females alive.
She said, "Rots of ruck, Lucky. You're going to need it all."
Hatred blazed in his eyes as he sensed her reading of his motives. Then he laughed softly, bitterly, said, "You think going hopelessly ape over a man is bad news ... think what it means for a person like me."
"I'd rather not." She wanted only to brush him off, to brush off the entire schmeer, to get back to New York again with Phil Barrett. Still, she owed this wretched little faggot something, if only for wiping out completely any lingering traces of her own fixation.
She kissed him on the forehead and said, while he was still flustered, "For a hopeless little shit, you're really very sweet." He smelled, of all things, of the after-shave lotion called Karate. Then she added, "Now get us the hell out of here before anything else happens."
"Nothing," he said, "would please me more." He pulled a silk handkerchief from his sleeve and scrubbed at the place she had kissed. "You've seen what I wanted you to see."
"And very edifying it was, too...."
When they parted at the front door, she kissed him on the forehead again, leaving the stamp of her lips in lipstick on his brow. He was scrubbing himself frantically as Stan Forman drove them away in a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom that had cost, he informed them, a cool thirty-three grand.
Joe Link flew back with them, picking them up at the airport. He didn't say much during the flight and what he did say was about music ... which was just as well, since the strain and excitement proved too much for Phil, who was violently airsick during a bumpy final third of their trip. He called The Dry Martini from his Murray Hill pad and begged off from coming in that evening.
But Tanya was in no mood to settle down. She felt a new confidence, a new restlessness, a new zest for fresh adventure to wipe out the past few hours and days and weeks. She left her lover with a faked fond kiss and went to the club with Joe. The manager greeted them with relief, and they took over at the piano and Tanya got the first real music lesson of her life.
Although he had made his reputation on the trumpet, like almost all musicians the black Buddha was no amateur at the keyboard ... and if his voice was thick and husky, his phrasing and musicality made it a revelation. Tanya virtually ignored the audience, but the audience did not ignore them. Never, with Phil, had she generated such applause ... and she discovered that applause was nectar to her soul.
At the evening's conclusion, the manager approached them and offered Tanya a contract job, said, "I should have done it long ago, but you were always here anyway."
"Forget it, sir," said Joe Link, holding Tanya in the thick circle of his arm. "This chick's already under contract ... to Stanley Forman. You'll have to dicker with him."
The club manager's eyes went wide at the news. He sighed and said, "You mean Alan Clark's Svengali?" And, at Joe's nod, "Shit! Wouldn't you know? The big ones always get away."
They all had a drink and then the hulking ex-trumpet great took her to a cab, said, "Where to, Tanya?"
She said, "How about wherever you're going?" A desire to go to bed with the black Buddha had been creeping up on her all evening for a number of reasons. For one, she had never had a black man before, nor a man so old or a man so fat. Nor, she decided a man so wise or with such self-generative authority. More, she wanted to have all that jazz inside her.
He understood her, said, "You sure that's what you want?"
"I'm sure," she said, slipping back into the curve of his arm in the rear seat of the cab.
He gave the driver an order, said, "I hope you like it where I'm going." Half hour later they were naked in the bedroom of his place.
On the Coast, Alan was riding a wave of new success. The show he had taped with Steed Bonnett after his incestuous night with Tanya had won high ratings and reviews and his television career had taken on new life. As a result, Irra Naismith was showing signs of taking him on for the lead in the screen version of Metropole. Gilbert Bellows' interview-in-depth in America magazine appeared, making him sufficiently hedonistic and controversial to renew the Alan Clark mystique.
It was decided to issue the duet between Alan and Tanya to cash in on the crest of the wave, and all at once the record scored bigger than any of his previous hits. An Alan Clark television special went into production, and once more Tanya found herself in Hollywood. The show was being taped live and a reprise of the duet between Alan and Tanya, with Phil Barrett on the piano, was to be the high point of the show.
Tanya had fought bitterly against making the date ... now that she was free of her fixation about Alan, now that she had slept with him, now that she knew the disgusting underside of his romantic image, she wanted no part of him. The magic was long gone and the thought of even an attempted romantic reprise on his part filled her with distaste.
Tanya was enjoying the beginning of her own celebrity. After an acrimony-filled trip to Jackson Heights, she put her mother finally in her place and had brought Dorcas back to Manhattan with her ... though Dorcas had not stayed long, her wanderlust soon taking her off on the first of a series of tropical cruises Tanya could well afford to stake.
She was being squired and sought after and, when she felt in the mood, screwed by some of the choicest masculine elements of the so-called Jet Set. She was in demand for high-paying society party dates, as well as for night club recording sessions, and could pretty well call her own shots ... subject, of course, to Stanley Forman's approval. Mostly, he had left her alone ... until now.
It was the suitcase-eyed manager with the lemon complexion who had made both Tanya and Phil toe the line on this one ... holding a contractual blacklist over them as a club and fat bonuses under the table as a bribe. Joe Link was on hand, of course, which helped, as was Lucky Winsted, which didn't.
Tanya paid little attention to the show during rehearsal. She knew the whole bit for one thing, and she wanted to have as little to do as possible with Alan and Phil. She did have a bit of backstage fun making an after-the-telecast date with Steed Bonnett, who was playing a comedy act with Alan in the show ... stealing him from the hay-haired blond starlet type who had so annoyed her on first sight in the Eastside Plaza lobby and who was playing a tiny bit in a production number.
Inevitably, her father cornered her in her dressing room. Beneath his heavy television makeup, Tanya thought he looked terribly old and tired. He said, "I just want you to know, darling, that if I had seen that damned letter first, I never would have let it happen."
Hearing him apologetic, seeing him so abject, she realized all at once that he was her father merely through biological accident ... that she no longer was held to him by the slightest of physical or emotional ties.
She said, "Screw that, Dad. I wanted it to happen ... and I had reason. Every time I fucked a man, it was you fucking me. I thought I was going out of my ever-loving mind. I figured the only cure was for you to fuck me in the flesh ... so I got you to do it. You had nothing to do with it, Daddy mine."
He went grey beneath the greasepaint and powder. For a long time, he just stood there and looked at her, seemingly to see her for the first time. Then with a crooked little half-smile, he said, "Tell me ... did it work?"
"You're damn right it worked," she told him.
He seemed to shrink in front of her. Then he half-smiled again, moved for the dressing room door, said, "See you onstage ... daughter."
It was the only acknowledgement he was ever to make of their relationship. Tanya sat in her dressing room, watching the monitor as the show began. She had forty minutes, thirty-nine, thirty-eight. Suddenly overwhelming nervousness seized her. She knew she wasn't going to make it. She could never go out there and remember all the chalk marks and the bits of business the director had so carefully built up for her ... she could never remember them and sing at the same time ... and her lines, what were they?
She had to be laid or she'd be dead. She pondered the possibilities available. There was Joe ... but he was out. Too busy and the possible complications were too appalling if they were discovered. There was Alan ... but that was out. He might want her ... and he might not. There was Phil ... but they were washed up ... perhaps for old times' sake.
Her hand moved for the intercom on her dressing table, but instead of Phil's number, she dialed Steed Bonnett's. His "Be right down honey," sent her corpuscles singing. She smiled a Giaconda smile at herself in the dressing table mirror. Might as well grab for the top while you've got the chance, she thought.
He came in, full of bounce and breezy vitality, said, "What can I do for you, honey?"
"Just what you want to do," she replied. "I've got the yips. If I don't get laid right now...." It was hardly a moment to beat around the bush.
"Did you ever call on the right man," he said, rubbing his hair-backed peasant's hands together. "I've got a little something I've been saving just for you, baby."
"My make-up!" she gasped as he moved in on her. "Be careful."
"Now don't you worry your plump little pussy over that," he said. "Old Uncle Steed's been there and back a thousand times.
"They don't call him old medicine man for nothing ... cause he's got just the cure for what ails you, honey."
She had to laugh at his rough-and-ready assurance ... and even as he talked, he unzipped his fly and pulled forth a sturdy pink prick whose purple head sprang to immediate attention. He put her on the edge of the table, adroitly lifted her miniskirt, spread her legs, moved in between them and, before she could utter a sound, inserted his cock in her more than ready cunt.
There was a quick flurry of action and Tanya clung to him, feeling the diamond studs on his shirt cut into her breasts through the thin fabric that covered her as she quickly came. She felt the quick spurt of his seed within her and then it was over. So adroit had he been that they hadn't even worked up a sweat ... he hadn't even disarranged her lipstick with a kiss ... yet she felt a vast surge of relief sweep through her. Now she was ready to go on and knock them dead.
He rolled his eyes tragically as he rolled to the door, said dramatically, "So brief, so bitterly brief...."
"We've got a date after the show ... remember?" she said with a laugh. This star stud was going to be fun. His very insensitivity, coupled to his vast vitality, promised to render him invulnerably male. She twitched the lips of her cunt as he left her, trying to retain the goodness of the feel of his prick within its tubular wall. She was humming softly to herself as she sat down again to watch the monitor.
Then it was time and she was walking onstage to the announcer's introduction with Alan already there and holding out a hand to her. The applause rose like a tidal wave and splashed over her, drowning her in its roar. She felt a moment of sheer panic, then a glow of triumph warmed her as she realized the ovation was not for Alan, not for Steed ... but for Tanya Trowbridge, herself.
She grinned in delight, and the surf-like roar increased. There were shouts of her name and, peering through the haze of light that separated her from the audience, she could just make out a tumult of waving arms. She had known the record was a hit but had taken it for granted it was Alan who had scored. That it was she who was the star had never entered her head.
But there was no mistaking the message from the other side of the light barrier. Lightning had struck again ... and landed directly on her. She waited out the applause, bowing, waving and laughing, savoring it like a veteran performer. She knew in that moment that this was what she was born for.
She caught a glimpse of Phil, looking at her with his jaw dropping over the top of the piano. She glanced at Alan, saw sweat creeping through the coat of his makeup, saw the haunted look in his eyes. She moved in on him, slipped an arm around him, drew another crest of bravos, under which she whispered, "Hang in there, tiger."
Tanya was in charge the rest of the way ... placed in the top spot by the audience ... nor, from then on, would she be taking backward steps. The world was, quite literally, her oyster ... and it was packed with pearls. She sang better than ever before in her life, missed not a line, not a cue, not a beat.
There was another tidal wave of applause to survive when the act was over. As she went offstage, she saw Lucky Winsted standing in the wings, looking worried. Pausing beside him, she nodded toward the slumping figure of Alan Clark proceeding alone toward his dressing room.
"It's okay, Lucky," she whispered. "He's all yours." Then she was on her way.
On her way to a new life, a new ... well, just on her way. Finally.
