HE KNEW WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG IT WAS Honey. He thought Donna did, too. When you live with a situation like that for a few years you begin to sense when the ax is going to fall again.
Honey's voice was tense. "Mike. I've got to see you."
His hand gripped the receiver hard. "Where are you?"
"Hollywood."
"Christ," he said. "That's a long way from here-"
"Meet me in Chicago, Mike. Please. Please!" That desperate sound to her voice, that thin wail of fear.
"All right. I can get a plane out of here at nine. When can you be there?" He looked at his watch as he listened to the relief come flooding into her voice. There was less than an hour and half to make the plane to Chicago.
"I can be there in the morning. The ... the same place, Mike?"
"Yes. Goodbye, Honey." He hung up and turned to his wife. She was looking at him with that fiat sick look in her eyes. Her hands were on her hips.
"I might have known. It's been three months since you've seen her." Donna turned on her heel and left the room. Mike went after her as she knew he would. She was sitting on the bed, her hands covering her head in that hopeless gesture she always used when she knew he'd follow her. Not by intention, by nature. He put his hand on her shoulder.
"Jesus, Donna. I'm sorry. But you know how Honey is. She ... "
"Of course, Mike. I'm sorry, too. It was just that I thought maybe she was going to be all right. That we could try to have some life of our own. It seems like every time we get things straightened out between us she calls. She's got to see you. Sometimes I wish ..."
He knew what she wished, but she didn't say it. She wished Honey were dead. Wished Mike had let her go ahead and finish the job she'd started so many times. Rope, knife, sleeping pills and once a gun to her head. But Donna didn't say it. She knew better. She didn't want to fasten her own noose any tighter.
As he packed Donna was sullen, holding it all in. Only her black eyes let him know how she felt as she did little wifely things like getting his clean socks from the drier in the basement.
She drove him to the plane.
"Let me know how things are," she said as he left her at the gate.
"Sure," he said. And got on the plane and sat down next to a little old lady from Cleveland who bugged him all the way to O'Hare. Pictures of her great grandchildren. Pictures of the house she had just sold. Complaints about her so
n-in-law with whom she was going to have to live, knowing he didn't like her-and Mike sitting there watching the lights of Chicago come up to meet the plane and thinking: old bitch, I don't like you, either; all I wanted to do was sit and think. Think about Honey Lou and try to figure out something to do, something constructive for a change. Something besides shacking up with her in a motel somewhere and screwing for three solid days and nights, something you seldom do with your sister. At least, you don't travel a thousand miles just to do it, knowing you are going to, knowing it's the only way you can keep her from killing herself or flipping off into her pit of hideous retreat. And while you're telling yourself all that-business you begin to wonder if it is the only way ... and how much you want to screw her anyway ... and what kind of a son of a bitch you are anyway, Christ, there ought to be another way. The tiling of it is, you both want it that way.
Checking into the motel where they'd met a hundred times or more, he sat down with a glass of V.O. and a cigarette, feeling the aching in his groin as he called himself a bastard, disappointed because she didn't get there first. How could she? Hollywood is more than two thousand miles from Chicago. He looked at the impersonal spread on the bed. At the television with the metered box. At the same chair, at the same walls, at the sameness of the situation and wondered if they had had this same room the last time. If so, he'd screwed her on that chair and that bed and that floor and even on top of that television.
He went to bed. He cried. AH alone a man cried, in the secret silence of the night, his sobs tearing at his throat, his
g
s being pulled apart because all of his life he's been told by his mother and father that he's got to be a man. Tears are a shameful thing. "What do you want to do, make people think you're a sissy?" That's the father-bear's voice talking to a six-year-old kid who stands there bawling because somebody stole his sled. Rough and gruff is the father-bear's voice just like in the story. And the mother-bear comes on with her voice of sweet reason, "Who's been eating my soup?" and, "Mama's little man. Such a big boy. Too big to cry. Little boys don't cry, son." Balls. They gave him Honey.
'This is your little sister, son. We called her Honor Lou."
"Honor?"
"Yes, son. It's an old family name. We thought while she was a little girl we'd call her Honey. Don't you think that's cute?"
No, he hadn't thought the name was cute. He hadn't thought the baby was cute. It was a threat to him. He'd been three when she came along. He'd hated her. He'd hated the baby oil and the baths and the little ugly red face. Just as he had hated the rest of his brothers and sisters as they came along once every two years for the love and the glory of the Mormon church. And if the truth were known, he had never gotten to like any of them very well. Except Honey. When he was ten and she was seven she had put her little hand in his on a cold winter's day and that had been the beginning of it.
Donna asked him once how old he'd been when he had his first piece of ass.
"Seventeen."
"Really?" Those black eyes had sparkled. "Tell me about it."
He'd made up a suitable story. Even then he knew she suspected that things between himself and Honey were not purely on the usual sibling basis. But she'd swallowed the story. That was one of the few blessings of being a writer. Lying came easily.
It had happened the afternoon after their mother's funeral. Honey had come into his room thin and lost, her eyes hot and dry with unshed tears. She had some embroidery in her hands. The needle kept going in and out as she talked to him, telling him how she felt about death at fourteen. Then she'd taken the material out of the wooden embroidery hoops and sat there in the chair in front of his desk. Twiddling with the hoops and folding and refolding the material.
"Mike, let me sleep with you tonight."
"Honey, you can't do that. You know you're too big to sleep with me now."
"Mike, I'll be scared."
"You've got Gwennie. How can you be scared when you've got your sister to sleep with?"
Honey had looked down at the embroidery hoop. "But Gwennie'll go to sleep. When she's asleep I'll be all by myself. And I'll be afraid. I'll see Mother standing over my bed. Please, Mike."
She'd come to him and pushed him down onto the bed, wriggling herself into his arms, pressing herself up close to him. His prick had jumped up and pushed against his funeral trousers and he'd been ashamed. She reached into his pocket and he let her. The pocket went down alongside his hips, into the front of his pants, where his prick was flat up tight. against his groin and she'd touched the hard hot surface through the material of the inside of the pocket. She jumped.
"Mike! Is that your ... ?"
The hot color flooded his cheeks. He'd pushed her roughly away. "Why don't you go away some place, Honey Lou? Leave me alone."
"No, I don't want to. Mike."
"What?"
"Let me see it."
"For God's sake, Honey Lou, that isn't nice!"
Her strange eyes had looked at him. Her voice was clear when she asked the questions. "Why isn't it nice?"
"I don't know. It just isn't. Go away. Go into your own room. Let me alone."
"But why isn't it nice? I want to know why you think it isn't nice, Mike!"
""Because you're my sister. And because you're supposed to not look at things like that unless you're married."
"Bullshit. I think that's all a bunch of bullshit. I don't think they're telling the truth about any of that old stuff. Like being dead. When you're dead you're dead. Mother's dead. They put her in the ground. She hasn't got any soul that's going to go to heaven. Like bugs. Ants and flies and grasshoppers and lightning bugs. When they're dead they're dead. And people are, too."
And all the time she had been talking she had been reaching her little hungry fingers inside his trousers and he had been very still on the bed and let her do what she wanted. It had felt too good to stop her. There was his prick, standing straight up under her warm fingers and she was giggling. Giggling because it was there and standing up big and hard and hot, but giggling with tears in her eyes because their mother had died. Yes, that was somehow a part of it; but neither of them had known that then. That was before they had left the church and gone to the university and gained a little dangerous knowledge. She had said to him in the warm intimacy of the circle of his arms, "Mike, do you remember the afternoon when we first did it? Remember? And how we felt so awful, especially you, because I wouldn't stop laughing, and guilty, well, a lot of people go have themselves a good screw when somebody dies."
"Sure. But brother and sister?"
"No. Not all the time. But it happens more often than you think, Mike. Mike, I don't want anybody but you, ever."
She'd said it then, too. When she'd been fourteen. Standing across the room from him after he had already told her five times to leave. Lying on the bed with his prick all out in the open while she'd thrown the wooden embroidery hoops at it. Laughing. "I got a ringer, Mike!" And the hoop had gone round and round and settled in the dark brown of pubic hair and he had been angry. Or was it really anger that brought him to his feet, his prick still sticking out of the unzipped fly like a big club. Was it anger that tackled her and pulled her panties down around her ankles and thrust his fingers into her cunt?
He'd been laughing, too, and somehow mixed in with the laughs were the sobs and her cunt had been warm and sweet. When she kicked her panties off her ankles and they were lying forgotten on the floor he had raised her legs up and draped them around his shoulders.
"What are you doing?" Shrieking at him. He could remember every nuance of her voice.
"I'm going to eat you."
He wondered as he was on the motel room bed how he had known to do that at seventeen. Had it been an instinct? Do people want to eat pussy when they've never heard of it, never seen it performed, never read about it? It was vivid, the memory of it, in his mind. He wondered if she remembered things that they had done together in the same clear fashion as he did.
Her cunt had been tight at first. So tight he could hardly get his tongue in it and she had squealed in a strange way that was half delight and half fright, wriggling sometimes away from his searching tongue and sometimes hoisting her ass up close to it, shoving his tongue deep into the honey. He'd smelled the woman scent of her for the first time. The heat of her mingled with the scent of lemon and she had tasted of lemon and honey and it had seemed right that she should. Right and as if he had always known it would be that way. Her clitoris had been soft-hard and his fingers found it and touched it with a tender.teasing tip, making it harder and suddenly wet. She went limp and the giggling stopped as she cried out, "Oh, Mike!"
Like animals they had been, without thought. Instinctively reaching for each other after the foreplay was over. Arms and legs melting together, a position incongruous to think about later in the fright of the night and the guilt of sweat and fear coming down on him as he though, Jesus Christ, what if she has a baby! And, How did he know just how to do it? But when it happened it was as natural for them both as it had been on a trip to the desert a long time ago when they had been dying of thirst, they thought, and came upon the mountain spring. Tongues attuned to the sweet nectar of cool snow water that trickled down the rocky formation. That was the way it had been. The tongue of his prick attuned to the rhythm of her sex song. Once she cried out. Stiffened in his arms, he felt the tenseness in her as something gave away inside of her, forced by the head of his prick. Then she was tense no longer. Her legs had tightened around his back and sucked him into her quivering muscles and he felt the push-pull of her channel as it devoured his prick in ecstasy. Her hair was a honey-colored sweetness under his sweating face as he hammered into her. His hands found her warm hard breasts and grasped them, holding on as he rode higher and higher toward the peak, carrying her with him as he climbed. Just as he had always taken her with him everywhere he went. The flames licked and teased him, showering his back and his balls with a bath of fire that was an agony of delight. His only fear was of being able to live after it was over. At last, he felt the fire spreading and fanning out once more and then centering into the apex. His prick. Coming out in jagged spurts. Filling her channel and shooting out in hot and consuming release.
Her mouth was a wind song, scented with lemon and tasting of honey as she sighed and convulsed, her breath coming hard inside his mouth as he held her while she came.
That was the first time she'd said it. "Mike, I won't ever want anybody but you." So small and fragile in his arms. Her body trembling at the onslaught of her release. "Mike, I won't ever want anybody but you."
Sometimes he heard her saying it in his dreams and he'd turn over and touch his wife, and his hands would recoil in horror at the feel of her flesh.
Christ, why had he married her? Christ, sweet Christ, why had he asked Donna to marry him when he had known all along about Honey? Known that they belonged together just as the leaves belonged to the trees and as the dew belonged to the morning grass.
Honey had amber eyes and hair the color of her name. Small, but long of leg, and slender, but hard-soft in the breasts and hips and ass, firm to the touch of his fingers but soft as silk and yielding to a gentle pressure. He saw Donna one day walking down the street of the college town. A big girl. Tall. Jutting breasts and svelte hips and strong legs. Dark eyes and hair almost black. What a contrast between her and Honey. Maybe that would do it.
"That." It was the way he thought of other women. An inanimate object with a cunt. "How would you like to have some of'that'?"
He had grinned at Charlie Rhoads, who was walking along the campus with him. "What the hell. You reading my mind?"
"Look at the way she walks. Look at the way she carries that ass."
"Yeah, Charlie."
They'd both tried. Charlie got the first date but he didn't make it. "No use, Mike, she doesn't put out." "You want to bet?"
"Forget it. She's going to sit on it the rest of her life." "1 don't believe it."
"Go ahead and try it, Mike. But here's the way she is. She's not about to admit she wants it. She's got hot pants but she's got a refrigerated heart. She's studying theology."
He'd laughed at Charlie. "I know a lot of girls who are on the religious kick. They've got the roundest heels in town."
"Yeah, but this one's different. She sits on a barstool and drinks a coke and bounces up and down. And says how she's going to be a virgin until Mr. Right comes along. Just like out of the books."
"Shit," he'd said, not believing there were really women like that around. And all the time wondering, as he wondered all the time, who Honey was screwing, and where, and if she liked it as well as she liked screwing him and hoping this big girl with her hot eyes and her cold cunt would take him off that dangerous road with Honey.
He thought Donna could. At first.
Maybe he had wanted to play the game. Maybe she had, too. At least he had accused her of it. Reaching for her dripping cunt in the lonely lane where his car was parked. Reaching for it and getting only a sneaking feel of it before she flounced away from him, swiveling her hips to the other side and stinging his cheek with a slapping blow, "Cockteaser," he'd said.
Her voice had been rough with emotion. Anger, maybe. Fear, probably. But he knew he'd made her hot.
"I'm not a cockteaser, Mike. I'm sorry I let you go so far, but really, I'm a virgin."
"What the hell are you saving it for, baby?"
"My husband,"
"Holding out for marriage, huh?" His hand had found her breast, his palm very much aware of her hard nipple under her thin blouse. He'd laughed. "A high priced whore. That's what a wife is."
She'd drawn away from him. "What do you mean by that crack?"
His voice had been deliberately cold. "Exactly what I said. You women think you've got a jewel between your legs. You hold it up. You let a guy touch your breasts and kiss your lips and feel your pussy but when it gets right down to the nitty-gritty you pull away real prim-like and start spouting a mouthful of hopeless horseshit. A guy can go out and buy pussy in exchange for gold. He gets his money's worth. Or he can go out and screw a girl who knows what the score is. But somebody like you, you've got your cunt on an auction block and you're standing there waiting for something from the highest bidder. A ring. The poor son of a bitch hardly ever gets his money's worth when he buys himself a wife. He ... " She'd put her hand on the handle of the car door, opened it and jumped out before He realized what was happening. Her voice had been low and angry as the outraged wail of a cat jumped by a male when she's not in season. Coming at him from under the darkness of the trees, sarcastic and stinging. "Listen, Mike Sheridon. I don't have to sit here and listen to you spouting off. It's only three miles back into town. You can have your views. And I hope you have a glorious time with them. But I've got mine, too. Get it?"
He had been enraged. Girls didn't talk to him like that. They didn't always give in right at first, but he wasn't used to girls like Donna. He jumped out of the car and ran after her, her dim shadow a taunting form in the darkness, dodging in and out of the path. He caught her under the nightblack shade of an elm tree, his prick a raging need. Bringing her down to the ground he fell on top of her, taking a savage kind of delight in her yells, in the way she struggled and beat at him with her hands while all the time her head was shaking back and forth. It stirred up the dust where no grass grew, just at that spot where her head shook back and forth as she said, "No!" over and over again. And kept saying, "No!" even as he spread her legs apart and held her down with his knees.
"Panties!" He jerked them off, a pleasure growing in him at her pleas. Her legs slammed together as he dragged the panties down over her ankles and threw them on the green grass with a gesture of contempt.
Her teeth were white under the sudden glow of the moon as she ground them, still fighting. It seemed to him that she was all hands and flailing arms and kicking feet. "Goddam bitch!" Like a sob he had flung the words into her face, into her open and panting mouth. She swallowed his words and stopped struggling.
In a voice with a hopeless breath in it she sighed. "All right. I'm not going to fight you anymore."
"Forget it. I don't want it that way." And he didn't. He wanted her when she wanted him and that was it. Sometimes he thought she'd played the game that moonlit night. Played it and won. Because after he had said he didn't want her like that, she had reached for him and shoved her long lean loins up to him. Held him as tight as she could hold him and all the while he could feel the heat of her through the silkiness of her skirt, feel the quivering cunt down there urging him on as she told him the things he wanted to hear.
She said it well. "I'm more afraid of myself than I am you. You see, I've wanted you from the first time I saw you but I didn't want to be just another broad in a long line of them who beat a path to your bedroom. And now here I am, no better."
"It isn't a matter of being better of worse. It's a matter of accepting yourself as you are," he'd told her. "If you want me, then why not let me know it? We don't live in a world anymore where sexual appetites are denied. The old double standard had been thrown to hell and back."
"You mean there isn't anything to this bit about a boy respecting a girl if she's hard to get?"
"No. I'd never marry a virgin."
"Who said anything about marriage?" she asked with a smile. Her hands were warm on his face and when he looked down at her lap a pool of moon gold settled there, caressing her where he wanted to have his hand.
So yes. When he looked back on it all he supposed she had been playing the game, but he'd left himself wide open, vulnerable for that piece of business about marriage. He'd said it first... but had she led him into it? Girls did that, but he hadn't thought about it at the time. And there'd been no problem of money or parents. Her's could care less what she did and his were both dead. So they had fallen down there on the cool green grass. He'd moved her head so it was no long in the dust. She vibrated when he touched her belly. He could feel her clit humming away even before his fingers reached for it and found it dripping. He'd never known a girl like Donna before. Even Honey had taken a while to get ready. But Donna trembled at his touch. At a stingy little kiss. And when he put his arms around her, allowing his hands to fall down to her ass, she would almost climb him-and it happened every time. She had been woman enough for him for a whole year.
Then Honey had called him from Buffalo and he had gone to her just as he would have gone to any of his other sisters and brothers. He said. But he knew he would never go to any of them the way he went to Honey.
He'd come home after that wild weekend he'd spent with her in Buffalo and Donna was suddenly too big. Too much. And the touch of her flesh was unbearable to him. Touching Honey was like touching himself. Donna's flesh was alien to him.
"What's, the matter with you?" she's asked that first night after he had come home to her from Honey.
"I don't feel well."
She'd laughed. "What is it? You were all right at dinner."
zipper. Another girl had come into the hallway and heard their frantic gasps. She'd brushed past them on her way up the black staircase, giggling.
It took him a week to get back to normal with Donna. He wrote Honey a letter after that asking her to try to find somebody she could love.
"I don't know. Something I ate, maybe. On the plane coming back."
She'd turned away from him. "It makes a woman feel like a tramp. Not womanly when she can't get her husband to get a hard-on." Her hands had continued to massage and tease. Her lips were like ice on his prick. He'd pulled away from her.
"Damn it, I said I was sick, didn't I?" Remorse and guilt built into his anger. He wanted to believe he was sick. Why couldn't she let it be like that?
"You weren't too sick when you had that virus," she said. Hateful. Sulking. "I think you went out on me when you were in buffalo. How do I even know you've got a sister named Honey Lou?"
"You don't know a shitting thing about me," he'd yelled. "Nothing! I made Honey up. And Gwendolyn and Matt and James and Pat and Robert and David. I made up my whole goddamn family!"
"Don't be mad at me," she's whispered, snuggling her luscious breasts to his chest. "I'll just lie here quietly. I'm sorry. I've never had a sister ... or anybody else for that matter, who's been mentally ill. I imagine the trip to Buffalo upset you. I wasn't thinking."
He'd shrugged. "It's okay." Real great of him. He'd been a prick with ears when he'd accepted her apology for something he had done. Yes. It had been damned big of him.
Then he'd thought of all the times he had screwed Donna. In all the hallways standing up, all the motel rooms lying down, all the back seats neither sitting or standing, but accommodating the leather seats and the confining sides of the car more than accommodating their bodies. And that once when he had set her on the bannister a week before they were married. Set her up there and reached up to turn off the hall light of her rooming house, her protesting, "For Christ's sake, not here!"
But he'd done it anyway. Holding her ass firmly to keep it from slipping, one foot on the bottom step, one foot on the second one up, his prick a giant and stubborn child bound to get its own way. In and out of her through the
Chapter Two
JOHN MIDDLETON LOOKED AT HONEY OVER THE martini glass he held. His eyebrows were up in that quizzical look. His voice was quizzical as he asked, "What's this guy got, a wart on the end of his prick or something?"
"Shut up, John," said Honey. "I told you I couldn't help it."
"Fine thing," he answered. He set the martini glass down on the black formica. "Honey, listen. I know you're going. I understand you've got to. But please. If it doesn't work out this time, will you call me when you come back to Hollywood?"
She laughed. Her amber colored eyes were remote from the laugh. Untouched by the tinkling sound that brought an answering lilt from people who heard her in the surrounding booths of the airport cocktail lounge. "It won't work out, John, but I won't call you. I thought we could make it together but we couldn't. Isn't it enough that I've been fair with you?"
"No, goddamit, it isn't enough. I happen to love you, Honey."~ She said, sweeping him with a contemptuous look, "Do you think you're the only man who has loved me?"
"You really are a bitch, aren't you? You really are."
She shrugged. "So I'm a bitch. At least I'm an honest bitch. Look, John, I never promised you I'd marry you. We've lived together for a few months and we tried. At least you tried. I don't know whether I did or not. But even when I agreed to give it a try, I said I didn't think it would work. Remember?"
"Yes. I remember." Middleton's jaws clamped shut.
She laughed again, the sound of it riding along on the metallic sound of the dispatcher's voice, "Flight twelve arriving at Gate three. United Airlines Flight twelve is landing at Gate three from Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas."
She waited until the sound had died down and there was nothing but the low murmur of voices in the lounge so she wouldn't be forced to speak loud. "The trouble with you, John, is you're just like everybody else. I've never seen a man in my life who didn't think he had the biggest prick or the best technique, or the best method of eating pussy.
Most men take a look at a girl and their goddamn prigo tells them hell, they can make it all right, better than anybody else."
"Prigo?"
Her tongue came out small and pink, wetting her dry lips. "My own word. Prick-ego. You know, like breakfast at eleven isn't breakfast and it isn't lunch, it's brunch. A prick isn't a man all alone, but neither is a man a man without a prick so you've got to combine the two. Prigo."
His face darkened. He looked into the empty depth of the goblet. "I think you're worse than a bitch, Honey. You're everything every gossip-column writer ever said about you. You're the filth on the tongue of every housewife who has watched you jump from bed to bed and divorce court to divorce court. I think you like to deliberately hurt people."
"Don't leave out the part about being insane," she said lightly. "I don't care what you think of me, John. I really don't. I don't give a good goddamn what anybody else thinks about me, either. As far as deliberately hurting people, yes, I do. I'd rather hurt somebody all in one fell swoop than a little bit at a time. I think it's more humane that way. And remember, I didn't lie to you. I told you I was tired of getting married and getting divorces. I told you I was tired of trying to make it with somebody and finding out I couldn't. And I also said that if I found out it wasn't going to work, I was going to tell you the truth about it."
"Brutally," he said.
"Call it that if you want to."
"All right, I am calling it that. You are brutal, Honey. Everywhere you go you step on somebody's neck. You run rough-shod over people as if they were so many blades of grass planted for your precious feet. Some day somebody's going to kill you, Honey."
"So what?" She leveled her eyes at him and it was John Middleton who looked away first.
"You don't need to stay, John," she said gently.
"Always the actress, aren't you? Tear the guts out of a man and then say something sweet and gentle. Honey, you amaze me."
"You amaze me, too, John," she said sweetly. "Always the screen writer. You choose your words as if you were putting them down on paper."
He stood up. "All right, Honey, you win. I'm not going to sit here and wait for your plane to take you some other son of a bitch. Not if you're going to sandbag me verbally."
She shrugged again. And sat there while he left, never turning her head once to watch him leave the lounge.
At the booth next to her a woman and three men stood up to leave. She heard one of the men say, "Grace, you know who that is, don't you?"
"No. Who?"
"Honey Sheridon."
"God. Ask her for her autograph, Bill. Go on. The kids would be tickled to death."
As Honey signed she heard the people in back of her talking about Honey Sheridon. Their voices were soft, but her ears were attuned to what people were saying about her. "You know, she's nothing but a ... well, I wouldn't say for sure because you never know about things like this, but my brother knows a guy that knows a fellow who picked her up off the highway one night when she was drunk. Hitchhiking, and her with all that money. Imagine! And this guy said she as good as raped him!"
"How can a woman rape a man?"
"Well, hell, you know what I mean. You take a movie star like that, young and lovely, well, hell! This guy said she came right out and said she was horny as hell or something like that. Imagine! Now, just imagine."
"All I know is, I sure wish to Christ I'd been driving that route that night."
"Shit. She probably isn't any good. All stretched out of shape if you know what I mean. Take a woman like that, spoiled rotten, always had everything she wanted, she's bound to be no good in bed, stretched all out of shape, they say ... at least I've heard that she's a regular nymph."
Honey smiled and handed the autographed paper to the man. He thanked her and walked away, bumping into a table in his excitement. "Sweet," he said. "Just as sweet as can be. See, I always told you, Grace, you can't go by what the newspapers and all say."
With a dark scarf over her hair and dark glasses like everybody else she managed to get onto the plane without anybody else asking her for her autograph. On the plane she sat down beside a blond boy who looked at her and smiled, with interest, but without that particular recognition she had grown accustomed to from the public. Relaxing, she lit a cigarette and leaned back against the seat, feeling the throb of the motors underneath her. Chicago was a little more than two hours away. Chicago. Mike. Mike. Chicago.
In her throat was a song like a rushing gushing anxiousness full of crashes and bangs like Bach; a clavichord, building to a voluptuous crescendo. A climax, deep and consuming, bringing a tingling sense of anticipation to her cunt. She had always been like that. Comparing things with things. A clock with a heartbeat. Music with coming. The feel of a forkful of roast beef on her tongue was like the feeling of a prick in her mouth. But not just any old prick.
She carefully stubbed out her ciagarette in the ashtray on the arm of her chair, glad as she was always glad that people were not as yet able to tune in on other people's thoughts. For instance, the boy sitting next to her who was showing all the signs of all boys on planes, trains and bus terminals. Like men in bars and restaurants, their prick down there calling the shots, putting all those emotions into gear getting ready for the long haul beginning with innocent conversation, thinking, hell, might as well talk to this broad, we've got a long trip. Yes. That's what the mind of the man says. Talk. The prick starts the mouth to moving, puts the words on the tongue, an invisible string, conversation starter that begins with the cock and ends with the cock and the poor son of a bitch never knows why. Once she had tried to tell Mike about her point of view on that but she hadn't been able to put it into words. He'd come back at her with something like, "Freud said that all of man's motivations were sex-oriented but latter-day psychologists have thrown that theory out of the window."
She didn't believe they should have thrown it out the window because it always seemed to her that every action a man had was turned to what it was going to get him sexually.
"Are you going to Chicago?" There he was, starting, and unless he was meeting a girl she'd bet that before they got off the plane he would be suggesting a shack-up someplace.
"Yes. I'm meeting my brother."
"You look like somebody I know," he said. "I've been sitting here trying to place you."
She smiled. "I have that trouble often. I think I must look like a lot of different people." Thinking she didn't want him to realize who she was, that he had seen her head on a hundred different movie magazines, her face stretched to giant proportions on cinerama in living color, oh, no.
"I saw you when you first got on the plane and hoped you'd sit here," he said. "It gets boring sitting all alone. And sometimes you can sit next to the strangest people. I once traveled all the way to New York from Houston with a little old man from England. He bored me half to death."
"Yes. It can happen." She opened her book, one of Mike's, hoping the boy would let her alone, let her read, and he got the point, taking a pocketbook out of a paper bag and opening it to the front page with a resigned sigh. She could feel the tension in him, his mind working, his wanting to talk to her some more instead of reading. But she couldn't find it in herself to give him any more excouragement. Not that she didn't like him, not that she didn't like men and boys. Even young ones. He didn't look more than nineteen or twenty. But she could never tell anybody no. Could never walk through a mob of people with their waving hands holding pencil and paper. Always had to stop and smile graciously and sign her name. Just as she always had to stop at a hotel or a motel for one more try, once a conversation got beyond the small talk stage.
The boy smiled at her as she got off the plane. Smiled and thought about what a shame it had all been. Boy, he could really have shown her a good time. So she put into her own smile an answer that told him she was sorry she hadn't followed through, that she was sure it would have been wonderful.
At the desk she told them she was Mrs. Sheridon, wearing the brown wig that covered her honey colored hair and never taking off the dark glasses. "Oh, yes, Mr. Sheridon, your husband, checked in last night."
"Probably sleeping," she said with a smile and wondered ... how could he? How could he sleep when he knew she was coming? Hoping he wasn't asleep because he was always only half there when she awakened him and she wanted him all there, all hers, all, all! Everything, the wonderful holding, kissing, sucking, screwing of him, and knowing and feeling it the way she was going to feel it... couldn't wait for it... dying for it... and even the icy dirty sleet that stung her face and wet her shoulders were welcome to her senses.
Cold dawn Chicago morning of dirt and a sun ashamed to shine, not overcome by the clouds and the sweeping prairie winds, just ashamed as the sun should be, ever. Looking up into the treat of the sky with the eyes of one who wonders why a sun would not be out in the dead of winter. Birds should be singing like a Mormon Sunday back home in Bellmonte when she was a little girl. Mormon Sundays don't dare to be anything but bright and shining. The key into the lock. The door opening. His face halfcovered by a blanket, such a dear face, just as she" remembered, oh, yes. She half sobbed, half cried at the sight of him, at his dark hair all messed up in his sleep, at his straight black eyebrows with that look of justice on his brow. And she remembered, "Mike, you should have been an attorney."
"Yes," he'd answered three years ago. "Been great. I could have left a murder case in the middle of a trial because my sister wants me to screw her. No. I'm afraid writing's a better profession for somebody who has to be able to go someplace when it's necessary."
"But you're so fair, Mike. So full of justice."
"Oh, hell, yes! Especially with wife and children."
"Don't. Don't talk about them. I hate them."
Why was she remembering them when she was looking at him lying there so warm with his mouth half open showing the white of his teeth? And he was warm, the heat of him rising up to greet her from the bed as she bent over him, covering his face with cold kisses as he slowly opened his eyes, dazed, staring out of their startling blue depths, "Jesus. I didn't know it was so late."
"I caught an earlier plane than I had thought."
"Get out of your clothes. Hurry. You're freezing."
"I won't be freezing long, Mike, oh, Mike, I'm so happy!" Doing a little dance as she flung her clothes on the floor, on the top of the dresser, on the television. Jumping into the bed and covering his long body with her small one, her feet reaching his shin bones and digging in with her toenails while he held her as close to him as he could get her.
"Don't say anything, Mike. Just hold me until I'm warm. Even my breasts are frozen. They hurt."
His hands reached down, taking them both and pulling them together, making them touch each other, his fingers digging into the nipples and making her squirm with pleasure. "I like that." Her head reaching down to his shoulder, cuddling, allowing all of his warmth to envelop her, for this she lived. Once a year. Twice a year. God. How could she face the long months in between? How could she not face them? She wouldn't think about it. Just be now. Exist in the now, the present without any danger of a lurking future where all the men had claws for hands and angry pricks that stabbed her like ice picks never making her feel anything but pain. "Mike." A whimpering sound.
"Oh, Honey Lou! My God." A groan torn out of his guts.
She was warm. His hands were up and down her back, resting now She was warm. His hands were up and down her b ack, resting now and then on the rounded ass, both together, then back up again touching every inch of her to make sure nothing had been damaged, nothing had been changed. She shivered as she felt her cunt begin to drip with anxiety, as all of her pores turned into open-mouthed cunts, millions of them, sucking at his hands as they took their familiar tour.
"Screw me now, Mike." She got off his body and felt at his side her arms and legs rushing him, pulling at him, putting him into the position. She felt him hesitate. "Don't make me wait, I haven't come for months, oh, please!"
Outside the wind grew stronger, sending the sleet against the windows with a whiplash rattle. But not comparable to the force of her ass as it thrust upwards to meet his prick. Not comparable to the force of its downward drive as he drowned in it for a moment, pinning her to the bed with it, holding her there for a second that was eternity and not nearly long enough. She screamed, slashing his back with long honey colored fingernails, her bare feet beating against his back as her nails raked. She cried, the tears streaming down her face, and she panted and jerked and begged him to give her more, more, more, deeper, deeper, "Make me feel it in my guts! Oh, oh! Oh. More, deeper, yes! That's it, rock me back and forth like that, round and round, oh, yes, yes, yes, OHHHHhhh!"
She was a ball. A giant ball made for his pleasure. He spun her this way and that, his cock a constant motion, digging into her, stirring her, beating her. His mouth reached for her sucking lips and her tongue, stopping his tongue in its motion, sucking it as he was sucking her body into his, as she was sucking his body into hers. This was it. Their bodies flailed at each other with a brutal savagery that was sheer heaven. Grinding, stabbing, thrusting, the consuming fire exploded in both of them together. She fell into an immediate faint. He lifted himself off of her quietly and gently, taking her head and putting it on his shoulder with a cry of desperation, wanting to grind it into the flesh of his body and never let it leave. He slept. She went from a state of consuming unconsciousness into a natural sleep and when they awakened it was to the gentle sound of rain and a sun feebly trying to shine through all the rain in the world, a sun that reached with shy fingers around the Venetian blinds and rested for a while on their faces as they stretched and drew closer to each other for the last three minutes of ecstasy they would need before they could go on to the next stage. Conversation.
Their urgent need to talk to one another was almost as all-encompassing as their urgent need to make love.
He watched her with a slow smile as she ran naked to the bathroom and came back with a soap-shiny face, smelling of the paper-wrapped packages of motel soap, the mint taste of toothpaste on her tongue. "God, you're beautiful."
She sat down glowing on the bed and allowed her hand to touch his chest, pressing him with it to the bed, holding him down there as if she would never allow him to get up, to leave her. That was what she was thinking.
"I can't go on like this, Mike. I'm going back into the hospital if I can't have you more often. It's driving me stark raving mad."
He squirmed and reached for a cigarette. "You know better than that, Honey. You know we can't..."
"Why not? Why can't we? I know a lot of brothers and sisters who live together. Why can't we?"
"Because of... well, for one thing, your profession. How do you think it'll look in a screen magazine, for instance. Can't you see the article, entitled, "Famous Star Has Incestuous Secret."
"Screw my profession. I've made more money this last six years than I can possibly use up in a lifetime. I don't need to be a star. I don't want to be a star. All I need, all I want, is you."
"But Donna."
"Screw Donna."
"My kids, then."
"They shouldn't have been bom. You know you didn't have any right to go getting her pregnant. You know damned well how I feel about those kids of yours. I hate them both, the little bitches."
"No, you don't." He reached for her hands and held them down. She had taken the one from his chest and was restlessly rippling her fingers through the air as if she were playing an invisible piano.
"Settle down, Honey Lou."
"I can't. I'm going to go back into the hospital. I know it. It isn't enough to see you like this, no more often than this, don't you know I'm not alive unless I have you?" She jerked her hands out of his grasp. "Don't hold my hands down! You know I can't stand to be held down, Mike."
"Are you hungry?"
"Yes. Change the subject. You think maybe I'll forget it if you ask me if I'm hungry. Don't you know I'm not stupid?" She yelled at him, her hands on her hips, suddenly standing beside the bed and leaning over him, all of her words dripping from her mouth in a string of bitterness.
He got up and went to the bathroom, slamming the door. His voice came back to her, clear, but muffled. "Let's not talk about it for a while yet. Please. Christ! Just let's be happy together for a few hours, can't we?"
"All right," she yelled, her face up against the bathroom door. "But don't talk about those kids of yours. You know I can't stand that. Just talk about... talk about..." Her face slid down on the wood of the door, the tears coming into her eyes in a sudden rush of stinging sorrow. She slumped to the floor and was there when he came out, all hunched up and naked, her face against her knees.
He held his hands out helplessly. "No. Don't for God's sake please don't go off into catatonia again, Honey. You know I can't... get up, goddamn it, or I'll break your goddamn neck!"
She giggled and jumped up, her eyes dancing. "Scared you, didn't I?" Preening as she looked into the mirror she said, "I'm a good actress, don't you think? It isn't all just sex appeal and big tits, is it?
"A minute ago you were saying that you didn't care about acting." He splashed cologne on his face and winced at the sting.
"I don't," she said gayly, flinging on a pair of slacks. "But as long as I am an actress, there's no sense in not being a good one, is there? What about it, Mike? Do you think I'm a good actress or not?" Her words muffled in a sweater she was pulling over her head.
"Fantastic. Let's go eat. Where do you want to go?"
"I don't care. It'll only be an appetizer for me, anyway. As soon as we get back to the motel I'm going to eat your cock. Suck it and swallow all of your come for dessert, drain it dry. For a little while." She looked up at him as he stood with his hand on the doorway. "Mike, when you're away from me, do you ever think about me sucking your prick? You do, don't you? Tell me you do think about it."
"Yes, Honey, yes. Of course, I do. Come on. Let's go eat."
She was worse. He could tell by the mad look in her eyes, in the flighty way she ran from one subject to another, in the carefully controlled voice that forgot to be controlled when she got excited. Blackness came in on him and whistled around his ears as he led her through the drizzle of rain that was giving up in defeat to the sunlight. He felt her tremble under his hand on her arm and knew she was holding herself together, as always, with pills to make her sleep and pills to make her wake up and pills to help her keep going, and pills to calm her and keep her from hearing voices. In his own mind he felt the blackness creeping in, the slimy slipping sliding madness that was his because it was hers and as they crossed the street he looked at the wheels of an oncoming car and thought very clearly, Throw her under those goddamn wheels.
Chapter Three
SOMETIMES HE THOUGHT MAYBE HE HAD BEEN the cause of Honey Lou's trouble. In the middle of the night he would awaken with Donna's hot body at his side and remember Honey's body the way it had felt the last time he had held it close to him. The maggots of his discontent would wriggle around in his bowels and he would move his feet restlessly, knowing he wouldn't sleep any more that night. He'd get up and Donna would awaken, barely, looking at him in the shadows from nightlight. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I can't sleep."
"Haven't you slept all night?" Her voice a mixture of exasperation and concern.
"Not really," he'd lie, and tell her as an excuse that he was worried about the second act or the closing line and she'd go back to sleep like the marvelously balanced person she was and he wished he could be. She said she could sleep because she had a clean conscience, laughing at him a little. She could sleep through tornadoes, fire sirens and the sound of lonesome trains in the night while he awakened at every flickering disturbance. The only thing that brought her to instant awakeness was the cry of one of the twin girls. Then she was awake and clear-eyed and efficient. Those were the times when he hated her even more than he hated her at other times.
Into the library where there was a door that would lock with a key he could put into his pocket. "Mike's study. This is where he turns out all those marvelous plays." (Donna playing the part of the proud housewife). But was Donna playing a part, ever? Shit, he didn't deserve her. He didn't deserve anybody. Running his hands over his beard, already tough and rough as wire stubbles, another shrill stab of unpleasantness added to the headache that started in the back of his neck and thumped in the top of his head. The uste of shit in his mouth and the ugly destructive drag on an unwanted cigarette that he smoked whether he wanted it or not.
He wondered what Honey was doing and who she was doing it with. Not that he minded her doing it. Not that at all. What he did mind was her ability to intrude on his mind when he was asleep, to jolt him out of an aching dream of blood all over the floor and Honey standing there in it up to her ankles, a four and a half month fetus at her feet. She was screaming, holding her hands over her eyes just as she had done when it had really happened. "Mike . .. Mike ... don't let me see it!"
He had picked up the lifeless purplish slick ugly tiling with its dead eyes and its swollen belly and its real looking hands and rolled it in newspaper, barely conscious of the blood dripping down between her naked legs, only knowing the need to get rid of the half formed baby. It seemed to move inside the newspaper. He wondered as he took, it down the stairs and threw it in the furnace if it were possible for a fetus to live and breathe. Was it choking and gasping for breath? Was it feeling the flames of the burning coal? If it did, it was only for an instant. He poured on three more shovelsful of coal and listened to the hissing sound the baby made as it burned. A small toe stuck out that would haunt him forever. Stuck out of the coal and seemed to stretch, as if the infant were yawning and stretching in the fire.
No. I only aided and abbetted her insanity. That's all. She was always nuts. He poured himself a drink that he knew he didn't want, gagging against the sudden upcoming of it hot in his throat, swallowing it back down.
He'd gone back upstairs and taken Honey's hands from her eyes, looking in awe at the pool of blood and wondering how much blood a human being had in them. "A doctor! I've got to get you to a doctor' You're going to bleed to death!"
She'd looked at him blankly, her teeth chattering from the shock of the loss of blood. And said, in a whisper of unbelievable horror, "Mike! What is that I smell burning?"
Running like an animal into the kitchen and down the basement stairs, flinging open the door to the furnace, screaming, screaming, "You've burned it up!! You sonofabitch, how do you know it wasn't alive?"
His hands dragging her out of the furnace, her face already in there with the roaring orange flames, all her eye-brows scorched off and curling, the smell of burning hair blending with the stench of burning baby flesh. Is that what it smelted like in the ovens in the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Burkenau?
Hoarse voice grappling with her naked body and all that blood silently dripping down out of her wounded cunt. "Honey, for the love of God you didn't want the baby! Quit fighting me! Please, honey, Honey! Jesus Christ I've got to get you to a doctor, oh, my God, please help me, she's going to bleed to death!" The sound of his voice bleating and weak against her hysterical screams, her bitter anguished maddened words spat out quickly from bloodless hps.
"Of course, I didn't want the baby what the hell do you think I am some kind of a monster that would bring an idiot into the world what the hell oh get your bloody hands off of me did you think I wanted you to burn it up alive why couldn't you have taken it out into the yard and buried it haven't you got any sense of shame haven't you got any sense of the way things ought to be?" And opening up her mouth, her white mouth drained of blood, a black hole of a mouth lifted up to the cobwebs of the basement ceiling, "LOOK AT HIM GOD UP THERE! HE BURNED MY LITTLE DEAD BABY!"
Collapsing after a nightmare of more screaming and slipping away out of his hands and back to the raging fire, his throat hoarse with yelling back at her. Yes. Collapsing at his feet, all in a pile down on the cement floor, her nose gainst the little round hole of the drain. Even when he picked her up he noticed the pieces of lint from a thousand laundries down in the basement that had gathered in the drain. Stuck on her nose, lavender, green and white lint and shreds from the drain.
Then, Honey smaller than she should be, all rolled up in a green and gold comforter. Bleeding through the comforter on the insane ride to the hospital, slipping, a dead weight, through the satiny folds. Falling to the floor snow white and scarlet red. Blood red, and naked Honey on the tiled floor of the hospital while he screamed, "My sister, quick, somebody, please, oh, my God, she's had an abortion." Cool voice of the nurse, "Take it easy, take it easy!"
Hands picking her up off the floor and putting her on the impersonal sheets of a stretcher, her blood still dripping. Where the hell did it all come from? Her eyelids a peculiar shade of blue, her sweat-wet hair plastered down on her head. Is she dead? Lips blue thin lines, Christ. That's not Honey! She looked dead. Deader than any corpse he had seen in a metal casket and lavender dress. Honey, dressed in blood.
That hour's wait in the room with an old man who was waiting on his wife to finish dying with cancer. Shuffling feet of the old man, his hands picking at imaginary pieces of ling while his wife died. Whistling a low and mournful and off-key song. Looking at Mike out of his eyes once or twice. And Mike thinking how the old bastard had a little guilt mixed around in there with his grief. Deciding that guilt was the color of putty while grief was navy blue. And thinking also that he well knew the color of grief and guilt. If she died he'd killed her.
"Mr. Sheridon, could we see you in the office, Please?"
Cool crisp, matter-of-fact voice coming out of lipsticked mouth and uncaring eyes, "Who will be responsible for your sister's hospital bill?"
"What the hell. They want to find that out before they tell me she's dead?"
"No, no, look, Mr. Sheridon, the hospital has to ask these questions."
"All right, Miss Hospital, since it is a hospital asking these questions, my parents left us a lot of money and my sister is wealthy in her own right and so am I, so let me go back down there where I can be close to wherever they've put her so I can be there when they tell me whether she's going to live or die."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Sheridon, but the hospital has some forms that must be filled out."
"Later. Later."
They met him in the hall. A doctor and nurse. He had gray eyes and gray in his bushy eyebrows and a lot of sweat on his forehead and a soft mouth that had seen a lot of people dying. Somehow Mike knew all that as he prepared himself, tense, for the worse.
"She's going to make it."
But it was after that when she went nuts, you know. That first time we had to put her in that place.
Yes, but before then she showed the signs. Yes, but, yes but, yes, but ...
Always there was that doubt, that fine line of doubt that was heavy against his throat sometimes in the middle of the night and about to cut off his breath. That question, "How do you know she wouldn't have been all right if you hadn't gotten her pregnant, if you hadn't burned up that little half finished baby?"
On the other hand, look at her childhood. He looked at it, his head in his hand, staring at the burned place in the rug where somebody had dropped a cigarette and left it there to burn. Thinking about the hole in the rug with a part of his mind-The part that kept him sane?- while the most important part of it thought about what made Honey crazy.
Honey at six. "Mike, did you ever watch a butterfly flying?
"Go way, Honey. I'm working on my arthmetic."
"But Mike. Really. Did you ever watch a butterfly flying? You know what they do? They light just for a little while and then they go away someplace else. Are they looking for something, Mike?"
Honey at seven. "Mike you know what my girlfriend Elouise tole me? She tole me that babies come for inside your belly. That the doctor has to cut you open to get them out. I don't want to have a baby when I get big. Mike."
"Don't worry about it, Honey, it isn't like that at all."
But she'd walked in her sleep that night. His father had heard a noise in the night, probably the dog. And there was Honey when he looked out the window, sitting with her feet in the goldfish pond, singing.
"Except when I got down there she wasn't singing at all, she was moaning down deep in her throat like a wounded thing. I took her in my arms and turned her face toward the house where I'd left the light on and her eyes were wide open and she was talking all the while, but she didn't make much sense. She kept saying her feet were on fire because God was going to punish her." That was what his father had said, finding it humorous that someone so young could be so pious as to have her sleep upset by thoughts of God.
Not until he was sixteen and she was thirteen and his father died did Mike say what he thought about the God in his heaven. He said it, when he found the courage, to Honey.
"If there's a God up there looking down on us he sure must be having a hell of a good time watching us all sweat out our miseries while he pulls the strings and laughs his fool head off."
"Mike, you ought not to say such things. God'll strike you down." "Let him."
And in a tiny voice, "I feel like that, too." She frowned, shivering and looked over her shoulder as if she might be afraid somebody was behind her, listening to her. "And Mike ... when I think those things I can hear somebody talking to me."
He laughed. Long and loud and without mirth, hurting his throat, the sound of it breaking into the silence of the garden where they were standing. The reds of the hollyhock blossoms and the golden cups of the tulips seemed to quiver at his laugh. Such a bold I-am-not-afraid-laugh. The whistle-in-the-dark kind of laugh of a fifteen-year-old boy who has jacked off under the silent cover of night and the bedclothing. "Who would be talking to you, Honey Lou? Who could hear what you think? Who could answer you?"
"God could. If there is one."
"There isn't one. We've just decided there isn't any. Remember?" Bold and squirming little mouths of fear swilling like hogs at slop inside his belly.
Her hand was on his shoulder, reaching up. "You're sure?"
"Of course." From a high tower of condescending boy to girlness. Silly Honey Lou. Only idiots believe they hear voices. Idiots and crazy people. What do they say?
"They're just... they aren't clear. I can only just barely hear them but I can't make out their words except when I'm not really listening for them. It's like looking at the stars, you know? The seven sisters except I can only see six of them unless I look away from them. Mike, how big around does the moon look to you?"
"As big as a cut slice of watermelon. Why?"
"People don't see things the same way, do they? To me the moon looks as big as a wheel of a car. Tire and all. High in the sky the moon rides along big. Why does it look different to me, Mike?"
"I don't know. Let's go in the house. I smell supper cooking."
Honey. Shy. Lost in books or the night sky. Watching the magic of television and looking one day behind the screen with a puzzled look on her thirteen-year-old girl's face. "Where are all the people?" They laughed at her. All the Sheridons, even the mother, and she had shrunk into a shell and not come out of it for three days. Then it was as if Honey Lou had split in two, somehow. The ghost of Honey was her appearance. Unchanged. The same golden honey of hair. The same amber colored eyes. The same heart-shaped face with the deep cleft in the chin and the black black mole on her left cheekbone just a little under her eye. But the child they knew was gone. With them lived a stranger who laughed stridently, the sounds shrill to their eardrums, ricocheting off the walls. The new Honey Lou walked in giant clomping steps. Sat with her legs sprawled apart, embroidery work shoved under the couch. This stranger in their house gobbled down her food using both hands to shove it in her mouth and licked her fingers and the palms of her hands, staring at them with wide and mischievous eyes, cackling all the while.
Mrs. Sheridon had cried out in protest. Reprimands were useless. A quick spat on a rounded behind was met with a raucous, "Hah. You didn't hurt me a bit!"
"I think Honey has a fever," said their mother. "I think perhaps I'd better take her to the doctor."
Dressed in a pale blue dress Honey went to the doctor aid spit in his face, screeching with laughter, standing on the seat of the black leather chair while the old man shook his head and stared at her. She bit the thermometer. "I don't know, Lillian. I just don't know." Mercury ran down her blue dress and rolled in little silver balls. She screamed her enjoyment as she tried to catch the quicksilver. "Maybe you'd better take her to a psychiatrist, Lillian."
Lillian Sheridon made the appointment. "And she's not answering to her own name. She says her name is Suzanne."
"I'm a bitch," said Honey, over and over as she bumped and ground her hips. "See me, see me! I'm a bitch on wheels so look out Mississippi!"
An hour before they were to see the psychiatrist the Suzanne character was suddenly obliterated. Honey Lou was back. Sweet and dreamy-eyed, at a loss to explain her behavior. She remembered nothing.
Schizophrenia.
Lillian Sheridon's mild blue eyes looking at the psychiatrist. "But nothing has ever happened like that in my family. What did we do ... could she have inherited it?" Wanting to blame somebody, her husband's people if possible, after all, they hadn't been Mormons for very long. His people were converts.
"It isn't something one inherits. It's a split in the personality."
"Perhaps with prayer? I mean would prayer help her?"
"Prayer?" The psychiatrist leaned forward. "Look lady, prayer might make you feel better. So go ahead and do it. But what this little girl needs is institutional care. It could get worse."
"No, no! I couldn't do that. Not one of my children in a ... no. You see, my husband passed away not too long ago. I'm all alone with eight children. A private hospital would be beyond my means and the state institution ... no. I couldn't do that."
"Bring her back if it happens again."
It hadn't happened again. Not while their mother lived.
Honey's voices came and went, sometimes distinct and sometimes not'. Now and then only a windsong, like a breeze in the trees and sometimes very strong, complete with long and frightening words and instructions. "Honey Lou, take matches and burn down the house. Start it in the linen closet."
A cold and shivering little girl, thirteen years old mid crawling into Mike's bed, screaming silently so as not to awaken the other children and their mother, who was lying right then downstairs in the sick room and smelling of death.
Running her words together in a ball of furry words, "Mike mike mike! They're talking to me again."
Teeth sounding like marbles. Backbone tense. Body rigid. Making that funny sound in her throat, her eyes big in their sockets, the whites showing startlingly round. His arms warming her, holding her to his skin, his hands running up and down her back. "Now, now, it's all right, Honey."
"No, it isn't." Her face sobbing into her neck. "Those people woke me up. Told me to set the house on fire. To strike matches in the linen closet, oh, Mike, I'm afraid!"
But of course she had not listened to the voices. She had Mike to run to.
And Mike to run to when their mother died. And it had happened then and kept on happening until she was sixteen j and pregnant.
He lived upstate in an apartment shared with two other students, studying law. Hanshaw had answered the telephone that night. "For you, Sheridon. She says it's your sister."
Honey with the smile in her voice and her warmth reaching out from Kentucky. "Mike, you think you could make it home for Thanksgiving?"
"Home?" A stupid question. But there was no real home for them. Aunt Laura had taken the younger children after their mother had died. Honey Lou had wanted to go to Junior college and Aunt Laura, who had never liked Honey Lou was only too happy to have her away from the rest of the children.
She'd asked Mike in her whining put-upon voice what he thought of the idea, adding, "Of course, Honey Lou's brilliant and all that, Lord knows, already out of high school at fifteen, but it seems to me she's a little strange and you know your mother used to worry about her a good bit."
"Let her go, Aunt Laura," he'd said.
And now she was on the telephone asking him if he could make it home for Thanksgiving. Still with that sweet warmth of invitation in her voice. "I meant the home place, Mike. I want to go home for Thanksgiving. We could get a turkey, one of those little ones, and I could bake it. Just you and me, Mike."
He hadn't known she was pregnant. Hadn't known it when he met her at the station in Bellmonte, all covered with a coat and a scarf and bright red mittens, her arms around him in her Honey way. Breathing on his face, her breath turning to white fog and caressing him as it touched him. "Oh, Mike! Wouldn't it be nice if it snowed for Thanksgiving?"
He'd driven his car. She put her feet on the heater and bounced up and down on the front seat chattering about how it would be so much fun. So nice that the folks had built the house far out in the country so nobody would notice smoke coming form their chimney, "You built a fire, didn't you, Mike?"
"Yes. Of course. I shut off most of the bedrooms, but there's a nice fire in the furnace."
"You shut off all the upstairs, didn't you? Will we sleep in mother's bedroom?"
"Honey, I've told you and told you we've got to cut that out."
"Yes." Crawling over in a corner and making him feel as if he had hit her.
Broiled steaks eaten in front of the fireplace and a bottle of wine, Honey playing the Theme from The Moulin Rouge while she took off her clothes and did a strip tease dance for him. He drank more wine.
Nothing but the fireplace to light her smooth young body. Her breasts taut and the nipples hard and red as she finished her dance, panting, looking down on him while the firelight flickered over her skin. "Mike, I'm going to screw you, I don't care what you say."
Why hadn't he noticed the thickness at her waistline? At four and a half months she should have been a little bigger, shouldn't she? She hypnotized him. That was all he could think of after it was all over.
Bringing her ass up close to his face she had swivelled it back and forth and made little circles in the air with it before she fell down into his lap and unzipped his pants, giggling. "It's hard for me. You can't deny that." He'd pulled away. "Honey, don't." "I'm going to. You can't stop me." Her lips on the bursting throbbing head, her tongue circling it, her tips warm and sweet and heavenly. For a long time she had stroked his prick with her hands, milking it as she sucked, until he had felt the come beginning to erupt, all of his good intentions gone into the delights of her mouth.
The wine was mellow and the color of winter roses. Another half bottle and her hands were demanding on his prick. Her mouth tasted of honey and wine and lemon blossoms as she kissed him, drawing away just long enough to say, "This one's for me."
Once in a while he remembered he wasn't supposed to be doing that anymore. There was a girl at school. Phyllis something or other. But Phyllis and her soft little pussy with its ready push-button faded away into the Honey hatch as she brought her ass up against his flaming prick, demanding that he screw her hard. "Dog fashion. Remember, Mike?"
Remember? How could he forget when they had gone swimming a week after the first time he screwed her and he had grabbed her under the water and pierced her water-cold cunt with his hot-cold prick. Had held her down and almost drowned her as he screwed her as he screwed her hard against a rock sticking up out of the water. She'd cried out that he hurt her, but he knew she came. He could feel it, a hot sticky mass of sweetness blending with his own and making the water roil warm all around his legs.
"You said it hurt you like that," he said as he pulled her hips from underneath toward his body.
"I want you to hurt me tonight."
"I don't want to hurt you. I only want to love you."
"Hurt-love me, then, please. This is the way I want it tonight."
Ah, Christ. What else could he do? With that sweet little ass trembling in front of him like that. The fire had died down to a steady orange glow that crackled once in a while. Her knees were on the worn carpeting in front of the hearth. Across the room their shadows were grotesque. Here tits hung down two feet long and fell in black shadow folds against the carpet. Her ass was like a mountain and his prick like a telephone pole shoving itself hotly in and out as she wiggled and reached for more. He closed his eyes and reached for her breasts, halfway surprised to find them just big and soft and hard as bullets on the end, not at all like the monstrous shadow-tits on the wall. She moaned as he mashed the nipples in between his fingers, bringing her ass higher and higher as she reached for another inch. He felt her body shudder as she came. Her heat added to his madness and even knowing that she was falling into a faint, feeling her knees turn to jelly that refused to hold her up he held her with his own strength and continued to jam and ram into her long after she had lost consciousness.
Awakening cold and stiff with his overcoat on top of him where she had covered him, he started through the house looking for her. It was dawn.
A cold and gray Thanksgiving dawn with the ice frozen to all the windows but no Thanksgiving snow outside. "Honey? Hon-eeee! Happy Thanksgiving!"
She wasn't in their mother's bedroom where he thought he'd find her.
She wasn't in the kitchen putting on a pot of coffee.
He went to the basement and jacked up the furnace, thinking she was probably in the bathroom. Poking at the fire and adding six or seven shovels of coal he thought of how he would have to tell her nevermore. Nevermore like the raven, nevermore like the man who had visited the prostitute and came home with a dose of clapp, nevermore because she was his sister and goddamn! As long as his prick was limp and she wasn't there teasing it with her lips and her hands he could say nevermore and quote all sorts of things, feeling the red shame creeping into his cheeks and promising himself all sorts of promises. Nevermore-last time.
The bathroom door was open and she was on the floor, a red wicked two inches of tubing sticking out of her pussy, a horrified expression in her eyes. Shivering under a ragged old housecoat with all the buttons missing. "What the hell are you doing?" "Giving myself an abortion." "Abortion! Who knocked you up?" "You did. Last July. When you told me absolutely never again and under no circumstances and all that jazz. It hurts. Carlene said it wouldn't hurt a bit, but it does. I think it's going to kill me."
He sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the tub, looking at her with a sickness growing in his stomach. -What is that thing in there?"
"A catheter. People who've had colostomies use them. I don't know, something about their stomachs being taken out and the only way they can shit is through a tube. I got this through a friend of mine. She used it on herself. See, all you have to do is shove it up in there, making sure you get it in the right place."
"You could kill yourself. Don't you know if you punctured your womb you could bleed to death?"
"I know it. That was why I wanted you to screw me last night. See, if you get your cunt all open it's a lot easier. I put it in me as soon as I woke up. You have to leave it in at least four hours. All night long's better, but this girl at college, she left it in all night long and it came out during the night so she had to do it all over again. I've had it in there about six hours so far."
"Jesus Christ! But how about an infection! Sitting on that dirty floor with all those germs, and did you sterilize the thing?"
"I washed it with hot soap and water and rinsed it with alcohol."
"Ah, Christ, Honey Lou. I'd better take you to the hospital."
"Yeah, sure, baby. You do that. Tell me all about it, why don't you?"
Her forehead was whiter than usual. A thin layer of sweat was on it and on her upper lip under her nose. Her youth trembled as she swallowed and winced at a pain.
Jerking her to her feet, trie narrow tube slipped out and fell to the floor, taking with it a blood clot the color of liver and the size of his hand. "Jesus Christ!" His eyes looked at it as it lay there quivering like dark blood red jello. Another clot plopped onto the shag rug by the tub, followed by another one and a gushing fountain of brighter blood.
She doubled over with pain. He supported her, his hand at her damp hair. "Can you sit back down on the floor? I've got to get you to a hospital."
"No! Don't be silly." The pain was gone. She straightened up and looked at him squarely. "Don't you see, if I went to a hospital they'd save it?"
"I'd rather have it saved than have you dead. Come on."
She yelled at him. "It'll be a moron. Or one of those babies born with great big scabby heads and a vegetable. I won't die, I promise! Only help me get out of here and into the living room where it's warm. This bitching bathroom always was as cold as ice."
Another pain hit her in between the hall that led from the bathroom and the living room. He supported her again and then he lifted her up and carried her in and put her on the couch where she bled suddenly as if somebody had cut her wide open. He ran to get sheets from the linen room and when he came back she was standing there by the couch, the blood in an ever-widening pool, the ugly purplish slimy almost perfectly-formed baby on the floor.
He looked at her over breakfast and wondered how she had survived. Did she ever think about it? Had she thought about that monstrous thing on the floor; that thing he had burned in the furnace the night she had taken the sleeping pills? Did it come back to haunt her, all of their love, the tube she had thrust into her protesting womb, the awakening at the hospital, the never-ending nightmare? Did it come rolling over her conscious thoughts at unrealistic times, intruding on the lines she was saying on location. Was that what caused her to slip away from herself and call him when she felt herself going?
Chapter Four
SHE LOOKED AT HIM ACROSS THE BREAKFAST table, remembering the times when she had called him and he hadn't come to her. She'd been sitting in the living room of her apartment. Minding her own business. Studying a script. Suddenly the script had turned to a piece of shit in her hands and she had to have Mike. Had to, had to, had to! Nothing but Mike's face would do for her, nothing but Mike's face, nothing but Mike's arms holding her, keeping out the long dark nights when she would hear that baby screaming to her from the flames of the furnace.
She got up and paced the floor, trying to keep from calling him. But she was drawn to the telephone and all the while she dialed she could hear the dead baby screaming in agony. Jesus pointed to her from the wall. A tall and angry Jesus whose face blended into a just and wrathful God, a God with a pointing finger, a finger with blood all over it. A million eyes stared at her from the ceiling. Sad eyes. Malicious eyes. Eyes with cancerous growths dripping that peculiar pus colored liquid from the corners. And the room was alive with the rotting smell of the cancerous pus, dripping, dripping. Mouths opened and closed silently, but she could hear the voices inside the mouths saying things to her, suggesting little nasty dirty things for her to do. The voices were full of oil, sick-sweet, like caster oil, rancid as raw hamburger left to spoil on a silent summer afternoon but still loud as the color of blood being splashed on a bathroom floor, gushing down her legs in a steady stream. "Mike, you've got to come to me."
"Honey, I can't. I just can't. My play is opening tomorrow night. I've got to stay here."
'Then let me come there, Mike!"
A silence humming over the telephone while he thought about how much he didn't want her there in New York with him. A busy silence full of unsaid words that were screamed at her throught the reluctant silence of the humming wires and then a hesitant, "All right, Honey. But please don't do anything drastic. What's wrong this time?"
"I need you! That's all. Isn't that enough? I need you. I hear voices talking to me out of the far corners of the room and the telephone, even the telephone is gooey with slime.
I'm slipping away, Mike."
"All right, dammit, I said you could come."
But she hadn't liked the way he said she could come. Hadn't liked it at all. She hung up the telephone and stared at it and remembered Tony Freeman who said he would marry her any time. Any time. If she married Tony she wouldn't be all alone. No. And he wouldn't be Mike, but he would be somebody. She dialed his home. Answering service said he was out. Out where? He had an engagement, in Hollywood. Oh? How nice. Tell him to call Honey Sheridon, please.
Fifteen minutes later the telephone rang. "Tony? I'll marry you now."
They flew to Reno and found a wedding chapel that was open all night long. They had to drive to Carson City to buy the license, drive all the way, in a taxi, but that was all right with Tony; she paid for it. Standing there in front of the minister who said all those things about til death do part and forever and ever. All she could think of was the way Marrying Marvin's shoes looked as he rocked back and forth on his feet. She didn't mean she would marry Tony and stay with him forever. How stupid, she thought, as he slipped the ring on her finger and the minister told them, bored, that they could kiss. They were man and wife. How stupid stupid stupid! Married, but only for a little while. Only until she could get over... the thing that was threatening her, it would go away, she would have somebody's arms to hold her in the horror of the night. Somebody to put a prick inside of her when the empty feeling grew too unbearable. But not forever. No no. Not that.
Then the nightmare that wasn't a nightmare at all. Even when it happened she didn't believe it.
"Honey, would you mind too much if I had a party? I owe a lot of people and even though you're working and have to get up early, I thought it would be nice if we could have a few friends in."
"I'm off Thursday, Tony. How about Wednesday night?"
"Sure you don't mind, darling?"
No, she hadn't minded. Nor had she minded paying the rent, the utilities, the grocery and liquor bill and catching up on all of Tony's past due accounts. She knew when she married him that he had very little money. Privately she had wondered why he was broke. Engagements at the Sahara in Las Vegas paid well and he was there more than any place. He was seldom without a gig and his agent saw to it that his salary was phenomenal. So where did all the money go? But she didn't say anything. She just paid.
The nine room apartment was decorated with flowers in every room. Honey looked at the entourage of florists making their arrangements with dismay. A wedding wouldn't require that many floral pieces. A caterer came in from some place she had never heard of and took over the kitchen, reducing her cook to the status of errand girl and dishwasher. An artist came in from God alone knew where and began to carve a huge naked Appollo out of a seven foot cake of ice. A bar was set up in the music room and three bartenders came in from the local union. A three piece band set up instruments in the big living room and began to go through their numbers. "Christ, Tony," she said, her voice prtesting, "all this for a party?"
He smiled at her. "Listen, baby, you don't want to do anything halfassed, do you?" "No, but... it seems awfully expensive." "What difference does it make if we give one real crash-bang of a party once a year and pay a lot for it as long as we don't have to have little ones every two to three months that would cost the same all added together?" She hadn't invited any of her friends. Tony asked her why she hadn't.
She looked at him blankly. "I guess, now that I think about it, that I don't have any friends." She hadn't thought about it before, but when she did she accepted it, realizing that a girl who kept to herself except when she was working-unless she was having a one-night and unsatsfactory sexfeast-wouldn't be apt to have friends.
Tony's guests began to arrive around seven o'clock. She I looked around the room and realized that all seven of the men were faggots. Five of them were well-known homosexuals according to gossip. The other two were obviously gay. Two women arrived. Tony introduced her to "Nancy" and "Kerrier." Spelled with a 'K'. When she looked at them closely she knew their real names were probably Nelson and Kenneth. Three more faggots and four "women" who came together. A couple. More and more and more. The three piece band played. The whiskey flowed. The laughter grew higher and higher in pitch. The room whirled as she realized, They're all gay. Every one of them!
A boy in a pair of lime-colored stretch slacks as tight as a leotard with a matching turtle-necked sweater stood on top of the piano.
"Who'd like to play daisy chain?"
"Yeah, baby," and "Why not?" Much clapping and stomping.
The band immediately swept into Daisy, Daisy, Tell me your answer, true.
The men stripped. The 'women' with much shrieking and coy gestures, removed their clothing. As Honey watched everybody got down on the floor and began to get into position.
It didn't seem real. Fifty to sixty assorted men, each with a prick in his mouth, every other one on his back, every other one on his hands and knees.
A line from Little Black Sambo went through her mind. "So the tigers put each other's tails in their mouths and went round and round, round and round, round and round, until they all melted down into honey."
So that was what that old child's story was about. No, no. Surely not. Long ago her father had told her that story "So how's the new little bride?"
She turned and looked into the amused eyes of a stranger. "All right, I guess." He seemed oddly out of place He still had his clothes on. "Why aren't you playing the game ... or whatever it is?" she asked.
"I'm straight."
"Me, too," she said, wondering what he was doing there "I suppose you knew Tony was double-gaited before you married him," he said.
"No. Not... not that it makes any difference. To each his own."
"Does it make you excited, watching them?" "Not particularly. I just think ... what a waste." "Yes, isn't it?" His hands were busy at her breasts. She stood there and felt the warmth of them, aware of the fact of his hands on her breasts, but not interested enough or angry enough to do anything about it. His fingers squeezed her nipples. She felt an answering twinge in her cunt as he squeezed them harder. Her eyes were on a particularly big prick of one of the men on the floor. She wondered which one of the men was Tony. It was hard to tell with all of them naked; all of them with their faces partially covered by somebody's else's ass. The man's hands left her breasts. He was saying something to her and she wasn't listening. She had to ask him to repeat his question. "I said how about it? How about screwing?" "Just like that? I mean, great! I believe in frankness, but I also like a little finesse."
He grinned. "Your husband asked me to come tonight so I could take care of you. Because I'm a friends of his and because I'm straight."
"How nice." Everything was so unreal. She allowed him to lead her to a couch. As he undressed her, she noticed one of the men leave the daisy chain and run to the piano. With come running down his legs he climbed on top, his limp prick sliding along the wood. He clapped his hands just as the man who had been brought in to 'take care of Tony's wife' was taking off her bra.
"Boys and 'girls,' I'll entertain you with a couple of nursery rhymes."
Nobody said anything. Nobody appeared to notice except Honey, who was allowing the man to play with her clit and not getting much out of it. He might have been an automation for all her body responded.
The naked faggot stood on the piano and smiled, looking down at the men who were in various stages of reaching a climax. The band continued to play softly, accompanied by the sound of furious sucking.
"Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack come on and kiss my prick."
The man pressed Honey down on the couch. She opened her legs automatically and felt his big prick coming into her vagina. Nothing was real except the feel of it.
The faggot on the piano clapped his hands and pranced up and down on the shining top.
"Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her. So he went to a shrink, he found out how, all he said was, Peter, Eater."
"God, you're a cold piece," said the man on top of her.
"Yes. Well, you've got to admit all this is a little strange."
"What a sweet pair of tits you've got." He was squeezing them hard and she was beginning to respond, even though her mind wasn't on it. She felt strange. Usually, except with Mike she had to work so hard to reach a climax. She couldn't think of anything but the screw. Repeatedly she had to keep saying to herself. "This is screwing, this is it, this is really screwing!" And if the man said anything at all he threw all her tortured labor for the come out of kilter.
Her eyes turned back to the naked faggot on top of the piano.
"Little Jack Horner, Sat in a corner, Eating a guy named Bly. He stuck in this thumb and Bly did come, so Jack said, what a good boy am I."
Three limp-pricked men left the daisy chain and came to watch her on the couch with the stranger. She closed her eyes and shut their interested faces out. "Look at him screw her," said one. "I don't care for snatch at all. It's nothing but a big empty muff to me, ugly as hell."
"They're all right in their place," said another one. "I mean, but would you want one to marry your sister?"
They shrieked with laughter. One of them tried to climb on the mans's back and stick his stiffening prick into his asshole, but the stranger reached around in back of him and swatted the little faggot away as if he were a pesky fly.
His prick was hard, hot and experienced. She felt him increase his tempo and her body responded without any direction from her mind. In a lethargic daze, she felt herself coming, amazed that she could do it with an audience, with a three-piece band and by now, several of the 'boys' standing around watching the performance. Did this guy have some kind of magic cock? If so, maybe he could get her off the Mike-hook, could take her down from where she had been hung on the nail for all those years.
She gasped and plunged into the last final delicious rock-bottom sensation and felt his big prick going deeper into her and the spurting of his seed into her belly.
When she had sufficiently recovered she asked, "What's your name?"
He laughed. "Ed Fortune." "The composer?" "In person."
"Mr. Fortune," she said in a small voice after he had dragged his satisfied prick out of her, "would you marry roe?"
"I'd have to get a divorce first." "Do it, will you?" "All right. Why the hell not?"
Tony screamed and raved. "Fortune, you asshole, you can't marry my wife."
"Why not?" Fortune grinned at the naked Tony. "She's married." "We can get two divorces."
"But we haven't been married but a couple of months! What'll people think? What about my public?" Tony looked slightly ridiculous standing there without any clothes on speaking to his friend, who also had no clothes on, his friend who had just finished screwing his wife, his perfectly composed wife who said, "Look, bastard, you didn't tell me you were double-gaited. Not that I care. If I cared I'm sure I'd have known when I realized what this party was all about. But I happened to like the way Mr ... what did you say your first name was? Oh, yes. Ed. I Hke the way Ed makes love to me."
"Shit, Honey, you could screw a lizard's tail and not know the difference. I've never known a broad as indifferent as you are."
"A lizard's tail would probably give me a bigger bang than anything you've ever done, baby," she said.
Mr. Fortune went to Reno. Honey went to Reno. They lived in separate hotels for the benefit of Honey's public, but Fortune's room was never occupied. Six weeks and one day after they had established residence they were married in The Chapel of the Bells by the same minister who had married Honey and Tony. If he recognized her he didn't say anything. And again she watched the minister's feet rocking back and forth, causing his body to sway in rhythm with the 'death do you part' bit, thinking that it wasn't true, none of it.
The magic of Ed Fortune lasted almost a year and suddenly it didn't work for her anymore.
"What's wrong, baby? Eve banged you all night long and you haven't reached a single one."
"I don't know."
"Well, listen, Honey, whenever old Ed can't get there, it's all off. How about turning me loose so I can be free to make it with somebody who appreciates me?"
"Okay. I'm going to Las Vegas for a gig in a week. I'll stay long enough to get a divorce."
And all the "Amens" had turned into "Divorce Granteds" and Honey had never cared less.
Chapter Five
HOW LONG CAN YOU STAY WITH ME THIS TIME, Mike?" She had finished her breakfast and was pouring more coffee from the pitcher the waitress had left on the table.
"I just finished writing a play. I can take a week if you'd tike."
Tears sprang into her eyes as she looked at him gravely. She mocked him. "If I'd like. I told you what I'd like." "I can't..."
She took a deep drag from her cigarette. "Yes, you can. You can do anything if you want to. Does that big broad-assed bitch really satisfy you, Mike?"
"She's my wife."
"And who am I?"
"You're my sister."
"Yes, but what else?"
"Stop hounding me!" He leaned over close to her. "Look. I can forget you for as many as two whole days at a time. And when I remember I can keep telling myself that I must not, cannot, will not. I'm perfectly all right until you call me from out of nowhere, Hollywood or New York and I'm sick again and I give in to you. But if you'd try to find somebody you can be happy with I guarantee, you'll be able to forget about me for as many as two days at a time, Someeday, if we'd give it a chance, we might be able to forget each other for as many as three days at a time and then four, and a whole week and maybe after that..." "Oh, yah, yah, yah. After that maybe we could be like we are to Gwennie and Matt and Jimmie and Pat and Bob. Too bad Dave got killed in Viet Nam. Then we could be like sisters, like brothers, like shit, like goddamnit, Mike, at least I don't lie to myself. I don't come on with this Pollyanna bullshit about how we can manage. I don't give a shit in a bushel basket how much you try to tell me you can be reasonably happy without me, I know better. I ... "
"Will you keep your voice down, for the love of God!" "For the love of whom?" "Well, me, then. Or you. Don't forget who you are and where we are."
"Yes, I'm a Hollywood star, the fastest lay in town.
Humped a million men last year and made a million dollars. But I never humped one I like to hump. Mike, why can't men ... all men, screw me like you do?"
He stood up, his ears stinging with the flush that was covering his neck and rising upwards, flooding his cheeks. People were looking at him. He handed her her dark glasses and paid the bill, walking out ahead of her and allowing the door of the restaurant to shut in her face.
"Bastard," she said, running to catch up with him. "Anybody else do that to me I'd kick them in the ass."
"You don't need to make an absolute idiot out of me in a public place. If you haven't any respect for yourself at least you could give my feelings a thought or two."
"I am, stupid. Like I said, maybe I'm nuts. For sure I'm heading back into my delightful little schizo pattern; but at least I'm honest with myself. Don't try to tell me you don't want me the way I want you. Come on. Let's go in and screw some more."
The room was stale, smelling of cigarette smoke and dried semen. She flopped on the rumpled bed, staring at the ceiling, "Mike, I got a letter from Kelly last week."
He sat down in the leather chair. "Is that what set you off?"
Kelly Carlisle, he played the piano and led a trio that was going places in 1958. Hitting Bellmonte, he'd met Honey who was home on vacation from school, staying with Aunt Laura and badgering Mike to come home.
Kelly, at first glance, looked like Mike. Same dark hair, same blue eyes, same straight eyebrows. "When were you born?" she asked him over a drink.
"1940."
"Oh. Really? You're the same age as my brother. He's going to be a lawyer. What month?" "October.".
"That's too much! So was my brother bom in October. Me. too. You know anything about astrology, Kelly?" "Not much."
"Oh, October people are the greatest! Creative, talented, make marvelous lovers. Kelly, you want to make love to me?"
"Son of a bitch! What kind of girl are you, anyway? "The hot kind, baby. Why not? Don't you think I'm pretty?"
"Of course, but... what is it, have you got a 'thing' for your brother?"
"Don't be childish."
"He the only brother you've got?"
"Oh , no. I've got a lot of brothers. Five of them, in fact. Mike's just the oldest, that's all. How about it? You want to screw or not?"
"As soon as I'm done with the last show 111 show you whether I want to or not."
Through the next two sets he played his piano and looked at her once in a while from the stage behind the bar. He also looked at the rest of the lonely females who always hung around the place where the music was, the place where the musicians were. Kelly was by far the best looking in the group. He wore his tight black pants with a flair and all the unattached women looked curiously at the bulge in his pants, looked with that wondering look of females on the loose. How big is it? It was in their eyes and in their gestures as they carefully looked and looked away, then back again. The fag, Sol Harris, the trumpet player, saw the by-play and grinned around the mouthpiece of his trumpet. He knew which one of the broadies out there would latch onto Kelly. He worried about it. Kelly was going places and he would take Sol along with him right to the top. But what if he got snagged on a hot little cunt, stubbed his toe and sprawled on his face and never got up again to play the piano? Sol had seen it happen before to a lot of extra-good musicians with that added sparkle, that free-wheeling drive and that certain something that separates the stars from the one who keep clawing with bloody fingernails to make the circuits. Sol didn't like Honey Lou. She was a threat to him. If he didn't make the big time within a year or two he was all finished. At thirty-four he was too old to attempt it many more times. It would be back to his father's factory and the steady diet of familiar pricks in town; pricks he knew every bulge, every vein, every idiosyncrasy of and Sol was a man who wanted bigger and better pricks just as he wanted bigger and better gigs, apartments, swimming pools and paychecks.
After the last set Kelly came down from the bandstand with a smile for Honey and all the broadies faded away, looking at Honey Lou somewhat wistfully, the wistfulness intermingled with anger. She was totally unaware of their existence.
They went to his hotel room where she trembled in his arms and drank three straight shots of bourbon down as if it were water.
"What the hell, baby, you got to prepare yourself?"
"No. I'm just thirsty." "You ever try water?" "I want to eat your cock."
"Blunt, aren't you? Hasn't anybody ever told you a guy likes to call a few shots?"
"I call the shots," she said in a tight little voice. "I want to do what I want to do and when I want to do it. I don't give a particular shit about how a guy feels." "How old are you, Honey Lou?" "Eighteen."
"What do you want to do in life? Besides screw?" "I'm studying philosophy in college. And music." "Music? What do you know about music?" "A lot. I'm what is referred to as a natural bom voice. You want to hear me sing?"
"A lot of girls think they can sing." "Well, I don't just think so, see? I can sing. I could make a career of it if I took a notion to."
"Sing for me," he said. He didn't tell her, but he was looking for a girl singer for his next engagement. The trouble of it was, most girls thought they could sing.
"I'll sing for you later. Right now I want to eat your cock."
He stripped and pulled her down to the couch. "You always want to eat it first?"
"Usually." She tearing off her clothes, thrilled at the nearness of him, at the scent of him, and at the fact that he was so much ... so painfully, so wonderfully like Mike. Her hands were eager, shaking, trembling, like a panic on his prick. Her mouth came down hard and she closed her eyes, telling herself it was really Mike and she almost succeeded. As she sucked and tongued and nibbled it a little she tasted him and was almost convinced that by some magic of chemistry she had found somebody who could scratch her where she itched.
It had been a bad scene with all the rest of the men she had tried. Very bad. The more she played with them, kissed them, sucked them, screwed them, the more she wanted. The trouble of it was none of them could reach the place in her that wanted to be reached. Sometimes she wondered if there was a door inside of her and she closed the door to everybody but Mike.
But Kelly. He was something else. As she swallowed his pumping come she knew he would reach that place in her that only Mike had reached. She felt her cunt bulging out, tbe clitoris growing into a giant wanting piece of tissue, blood-swollen and all but crying out for the touch of his cock as it reached its face up to be rubbed on the side of his cock.
Afterwards he said, "You shouldn't have taken me all the way, child. There's nothing left for you."
She grinned at him. "I'll make something for me out of it. You aren't an old man, are you?" "No, but it'll take me a while to get it up again." "I'll get it up again. I like to suck it first because it lasts longer the second time around."
"Whatever you say, sugar." He went to the piano. "Sing for me now?"
She shrugged, listened to the introduction of Night and Dry and open her mouth and sang it with a purity, a sweetness and a wholesomeness that was her own absolute "You're good, child. How about something on the blues "St. Louis Woman?"
He nodded and gave her an introduction and she opened up her guts and spilled them out through her golden and powerful voice. When she was finished with the first chorus he stopped playing and said, "Listen to me chicken. A voice like that only happens once in a lifetime. What the hell are you doing studying philosophy?"
"I was brought up in the Mormon church. I've got a lot of brothers and sisters and when we were about twelve years old our life was planned out for us-with our consent, of course-and since I had what is usually referred to as a 'good mind' it was agreed that I go into something where I can further the aims of the church. Besides... I think you're putting me on. You don't have to, you know. I think I've already shown you that you don't need to give me the treatment in order to get into my pants."
"Well, yes!" He smiled. "I'd have to agree to that." Anyway, when you get right down to it, I very seldom have to give anybody 'the treatment' as you call it. Like you, I never have any trouble getting into anybody's pants. So when I tell you I'd like to see you use that glorious voice I mean it."
"Well, whaddya know! Okay. I'll think about it. Meanwhile, hold me. Kiss me. Love me and pet me a little because I'm starved to death for it." Again she felt that flicker of recognition toward him. Naked, her body pressed against his, she knew the feel of him against her skin and it was good. Not as good as Mike, of course, but maybe she'd get used to the difference. Out of them all, and some of their names she didn't even remember, there had always been that thing that held her back. That thing that shut her silent door. Part of it was the alien way in which they went about the business of making love. None of them would allow her the right to be herself like Mike did. None of them felt 'just right' like Mike did. When he slipped his prick inside of her she knew there was a prick, goddamnit inside of her. A living thing with a will and a mind of its own, something that could reach her because it belonged to her, yes. But more than that. The rest of them had been just so much poking and banging. She had lied to them, yes. Because she hadn't wanted to sit up and scream at them laughing at them bursting their ego. "Great," she'd always said. "Wonderful." Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of the rest of it, too. Never telling them she had felt like a mechanical doll with a hole between its legs being screwed by a equally mechanical boy doll with a mechanical prick, in, out, wham, bam, ("We balled, didn't we, baby?") Wanting sometimes to whang them back a scathing sarcas, that was bitter on her tongue but bitten back out of empathy. Because, bless their stupid little mechanical pricks, it wasn't their fault they weren't Mike.
But Kelly was different. There was something alive down there when he finally inserted his cock into her cunt. Her cunt came alive to match the life and she thought, closing her eyes and praying a little, "Thank God. It isn't true. Mike isn't the only one who can do it to me."
Well, so it hadn't been the all-consuming thing she had known with Mike. Well, so what? she asked herself. She had come, hadn't she? The come was the thing, wasn't it? Hell yes, it was, and it would get better with Kelly when she got to know him better. Didn't all good things improve with age? Maybe she would really and truly be able to release Mike from her horrible grip. He wanted to be released, she knew well enough. Okay, she'd give this Kelly Carlisle boy a chance. Kelly Carlisle, who was so much like Mike, who even smelled like him and tasted like him and screwed like him. What more could she want?
Never mind that small voice down there in her bowels that answered her back mournfully that she knew it wasn't quite ... That the more ... that what she wanted ... was the real thing and she knew it and she was only fooling herself when she asked that question, goddamnit! She knew what she wanted. Mike. But she couldn't have him. Not forever like getting married and having a kid or two. Not living together with him every day and waking up in bed with him and feeling her arms around him every day and waking up in bed with him feeling her arms around him and arms around her. God, how they slept when they slept together!
Yes. The thing of it was, she'd have to give Kelly time for her to get used to him.
So she did.
Three weeks.
At the end of the three weeks she knew that what Kelly was that reminded her of Mike was only a reminder. His looks, the feel of his flesh, the way he screwed her. Then J the letter came from Mike. He was going to marry some girl I named Donna He knew she would understand.
Biting the paper the letter was written on she had run screaming through her Aunt Laura's house, tearing her hair and kicking over furniture. The younger brothers and sisters had looked at her as if she were a madwoman. So she had calmed down, ashamed of herself, and called Kelly.
"Okay, sweetie. I'll go with your band. On one condition. Let's get married."
The silence roared through her ears as she waited for his answer. Her heart thumped and jumped inside her chest. God. Wouldn't it be awful if he didn't care that much about her ass?
But he did. They were married by a Justice of the Peace! with Aunt Laura and all the kids dressed up in their new spring outfits. She started singing the next week. Singing and rehearsing and balling Kelly until he was panting for breath. Sometimes she came. Sometimes she didn't. But he didn't know the difference and she began to resent him. Thinking, Jesus, you are a phony son of a bitch. You talk all the time about sensitivity and you don't even know, for Christ's sake, whether or not I come!
Looking at him out of the corner of her eyes and allowing herself to get bugged by little habits. Habits thai other people had, everybody was entitled to. Yes, she tried to talk herself out of letting those little insignificant and meaningless traits of his get to her. But the more she tried the more she found the other half of her mind taunting her saying snide little thing like, "Mike wouldn't dream of coming in bed wet from the shower, why the hell doesn't Kelly at least dry his back off?" And, "Mike would never kiss me in the morning without brushing his teeth first. Wrinkling her nose against the smell of Kelly's early-morning breath, fetid from too much to drink the night before. She found herself getting angry at the way he scratched his balls, at the way he left his dirty shorts on the floor for her to pick up, at his carelessness in leaving the roll of toilet paper on the shelf instead of putting it in the holder, her voice shrill as she yelled at him, "Kelly, would it absolutely break your heart to put the toilet paper in the holder?"
His eyes when he looked at her, hurt and puzzled, sensing that there was something deeper than a little thing like that. Something that was getting to her, a bigger thing, else why would she be constantly on the rampage at him about little things?
Her voice was magnificent. People came from distant cities to hear her sing. And she was beautiful.
She was singing with the group a year after they had been together in a little place in Anaheim, California, when a big fat cigar-smoking man tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Baby, how'd you like to make a picture?"
She moved her shoulder away from his fat hand. "Go screw yourself, mister."
He grinned around his cigar. He had weak blue eyes and a lot of yellowish looking hair that grew down the back of his neck. He wore a wine colored shirt and a tie like they wore during the forties, wide and full of little figures. His trousers were pleated and all the pleats were wide open and bulging outwards against his big fat belly. Yellow sandals covered his big fat feet in places where they did little good. She was looking at him angrily and wondering why she always had to have the weirdoes hounding her when Kelly came up to them and shook the fat man's hand, saying, "He wants to take you away from me. Take you to Hollywood and make a star out of you." Smiling and not paying any attention to big fat toes down there inside of those stupid sandals and the black toenails long and greasy.
"Hah!" she laughed, wondering why Kelly saw fit to humor an obvious Creton.
"This is Mitch Millsap, Honey."
She froze. "Mitch Millsap! You've got to be kidding." Her eyes swept his grease-stained shirt, his yellow haystack hair and his almost bare feet with their dirty toenails. Even when she had lived back home in Iowa she knew who Mitch Millsap was. The starmaker. This grotesque fat ball of grease couldn't possibly be Mitch Millsap. "You wanta be a star, honey?"
"I hadn't thought about it," she said coldly, still not believing that he was really Mitch Millsap.
"Don't pay any attention to Honey," Kelly said in a fawning tone of voice she had never heard before. He laughed his phony laugh and put his hand around her shoulder. "You shouldn't believe it, but when I first met Honey she was studying Philosophy. She wasn't particularly interested in being a singer, either."
"No shit." The agent looked at her and shook his head. Mosta these broads had no talent, no looks, no tits, no nothin', they wanta be a star and all you can do is tell 'em to go back to slinging' hash or making' their bosses and I see a cool kinda chick with everything Miss No Talent thinks she's got and she's not interested. No shit! I don't believe it. "Listen, Honey, I'm not layin' something on you. dig? You got a nice group to back ya, understand? The little Fag guy's good on the horn, the drummer boy could be replaced but he's all right and this kid you're married to is as hot to trot as you aren't. I got a spot coming up in a new flick that's gonna set the world on its ear. You do a little studying, Kelly says you got a brain or two in your lovely little head, you do a little working out with a good drama coach and you got it made, baby. So all you got to do is say yes or no. We can all make some money if you're interested."
"Come on, Honey," said Kelly. "Think it over. Why not?"
"Okay. So I'll think it over."
She did for a week with Kelly every hour on the hour and sometimes on the half hour saying, "I don't want to badger you, Honey, but remember this is our big break." And, "Let me tell you one thing, a group capable of attacting the attention of somebody like Mitch Millsap has got to have it, there's no two ways of looking at it Uh ... Honey, have you given his proposition any thing?" And, "Honey, listen, do you realize ... not that I'm trying to rush you, but... have you come to a decision?"
They went to Hollywood and a year later their first picture was released. Honey's photograph was on three movie magazines and the studio renewed her contract. Very reluctantly, they renewed the group's. The next year when option time was coming up Kelly was high on speed. They didn't renew the group's contract but they did Honey's and Kelly blamed it all on Honey. "You ungraded us deliberately."
She stared at him. "How can you say that? I didn't even appear in one goddamn picture with you."
"Well, you managed to kill it for us. I don't know how, but you did it, and when I find out how boy, there'll be plenty of hell to play."
"Yeah, Well, play it when you find out. Play it now. I'm tired. I've got to get some rest so I can do the scenes tomorrow."
She got into bed and he fell on top of her, fully dressed, crying. "Honey, baby, don't leave me behind, honest to God, I can't take it, it isn't fair, you hear me, it isn't fair! We've got what it takes, you said it, Mitch said it, the directors all said it, so what happened? I didn't mean that. I mean about you pulling something. Forgive me, sweet."
"Okay. Get off of me, will you? You're crushing the life out of me."
"What's happened to us, Honey? God, you used to be so different. Now you're all the time tired or have to go to bed early or something. Always turning me off. What's the matter between us?"
"Nothing, Kelly. I guess it's the stuff. You aren't the same. When you screw me nothing happens anymore. It's like a stranger with a cock that sort of reminds me of yours. I just don't like it anymore."
"We're through, huh?"
"Putting it like that, yes."
He hit her. Screaming and yelling and threatening, holding a pillow over her face in an attempt to smother her, a madness creeping into him from his frustration. He said things like, "It was you that made me start, you, goddamnit, never quite there, always with your eyes shut, you couldn't bear to look at me, baby. I was never sure of you, that started it, and when I got started I couldn't stop. But give me another chance, please. Please." Taking the pillow off her face while she struggled painfully for breath, feeling a crushing rock against her chest, the burning pain of air getting to her lungs.
He was crying. She sat up and reached for him with her arms, telling him of course she hadn't meant it, it was just that she was so tired. And allowed him to make love to her once more, her teeth ground together as she told herself it was the last time. The last time didn't bother her any. All she wanted was sleep. Peace and quiet. Then tomorrow she wouldn't come home. Let him have her furniture, her clothes, everything. She was so tired. She felt him on top of her plunging in and out of her and remembered to put a little life into it so he would go to sleep and leave her to hell alone.
She finished the picture, badgered by Kelly's threatening shadow everywhere she went. His nodding head met her in her dreams, strung out on heroin, the pupils of his eyes tiny and black and sharp as pinpoints. Sometimes in her dreams the pupils would come out like needles and sting her breasts and she'd awaken screaming. As soon as the picture was completed, she freaked out. In the middle of the night she awakened at a strange noise, not sure whether she had dreamed the noise or it was real. Sitting up in bed she saw herself slinking around the room looking under the bed, looking under the chair, looking under the vanity, and all the time there she was, in the bed. "Two of me," she said in a scared whisper, and looked at herself standing by the bed, staring her in the face. She screamed. The self that stood there by the bed was somebody she would never have known had it not been for the same features. She screamed again and hid her face with her hands and the other Honey just stood there silently, staring at her with those dead looking eyes.
Mrs. Hopper came from her bedroom, her brown braids swinging, in her hand a small revolver. "What is it, Miss Sheridon? You scared the liver out of me!"
Honey pointed. "There I am. Don't you see me? Which one is real?"
She laughed. It was a high-pitched laugh full of terror. She stood up naked on the bed. "Will the real Honey Sheridon please stand up?" And collapsed on the bed again, covering her face with the pillows.
"For the love of all that is holy." said the housekeeper, and called a doctor.
Honey-Suzanne, a composite character, emerged from the hysterical figure they brought into Desert View on a stretcher, confined, constrained and under the influence of barbiturates that would have knocked out a three hundred pound man.
"Call my brother."
"Yes, Miss Sheridon."
"Call my brother, don't 'Yes, Miss Sheridon' me! I know you, you think I'm crazy. He can tell you. He knows all about me, call him, goddamn your filthy bastardly hides, call my brother!"
Chapter VI
MIKE HAD BEEN UP ALL NIGHT LONG WRITING ON the second act of his new play when the telephone rang and jarred him out of the dim stage of his mind where his characters walked and talked and smelled things and tasted. He stared at it for a second and let it ring three more times, picking it up with a sense of doom. Donna was in the hospital with the twins. They were three days old. But it wasn't Donna he was thinking of as he lifted the telephone. It was Honey. "Yes." His voice hoarse with the cigarettes and black coffee of all night long, his mind already arranging things so he could go to her.
It was ten o'clock in the morning in Hollywood. Very reasonable that they should call him. Yes. He was Mike Sheridon. Yes, he was Honey's brother. No! Not again! Well... yes. As a matter of fact, she had a past history of schizophrenia. A long time ago. She'd been ... twelve. Or thirteen. Yes. He could come.
Donna was a madonna in a pale pink nightgown of silk. "The twins were tiny somethings with an identity. They were with her on the hospital bed, their eyes closed tightly in sleep, their small mouths partially open. He was reminded of puppy dogs as he looked at them and at his wife with her all beautiful black hair spread out on the pillow. "I've got to go to the West Coast."
Her eyes were bright. "Oh? What's up? Hollywood buy one of your plays?"
"No. It's my sister. Honey. She's sick. Very sick. In a hospital."
Tears in his eyes, adding to their brightness. "How long will you be gone, Mike?"
"I don't know. No longer than I have to."
"I'd planned how we would be when you came to bring me home from the hospital." Blinking back the tears, swallowing the lump in her throat, very brave. Even a brave smile like on TV, looking at him from the white pillow, a twin on each side, 2 soap opera, for Christ's sake. All that was needed was mood music fitting for John's Other Wife and the announcer all dressed up in a dentist's coat grinning over a tube of toothpaste.
"Well, yes ... I'm sorry. You're looking lovely." He touched her nightgown, holding the silk between his thumb and fingers, something to hold on to. Something to hold on to him, really, to keep him from bolting and running, running all the way to Hollywood.
"I'll... uh ... call you," he said, still holding onto her nightgown. He remembered he was a father and took his hand away from the folded piece of pink silk. He touched each little rosy newborn face with his index finger and bent down and kissed Donna's pink mouth. He was revolted at the smell of new milk in her breasts. It smelled like canned milk, something he had always detested.
Even on the plane he felt like getting out in the middle of the sky and running through the clouds. Hurry, hurry, hurry.
He hardly recognized her. Bright smile and perfect white teeth were all that were left of her. If it hadn't been for that smile and the black mole on her face he would have sworn they were playing some kind of a trick on him, wanting to tell them that was not Honey Lou, could not possible be. Thin and haggard, her eyes no longer amber, but instead the color of dull and dirty earth. Reaching out a bony hand and saying in a flat voice, "There must be a mistake. I don't know you. My name is Suzanne."
She knew she was somebody named Suzanne. A somebody who went into shrieking fits of laughter, motivated by some strange force that made her jump on furniture, tear off her clothing and sing wild songs. She spoke ixyi low voice that was penetrating and desperate, all the time gesturing wildly with her hands. "They've got me on some kind of dope. I don't know what it is, but it makes me too weak to move. Listen, you've got a kind face. I know you're one of 'them', but if you'll just look deeply into your soul you'll see that it isn't right to keep a person confined to a hospital. This is a nut house, do you know that? I don't know why they're keeping me here, what their motives are, but surely you can see that I'm not crazy. Can't you?" And all the time with that look of cunning intelligence on her face.
They had some new medication they wanted to use on her. They needed somebody's permission. He gave it. After a day on the new drug she was talking to him one afternoon from the bed, still trying to convince him that her name was not Honey, it was Suzanne, when her eyes suddenly changed and she faltered in the middle of a sentence. "Mike! Oh, Mike!" Reaching for him with her arms and sobbing against his shoulder. "Cuddle me, Mike, I'm so afraid! It was awful! I could see me someplace where I wasn't, oh, Mike, take me home with you!" To Honey it was as if there had been no two months of time elapse between the time they brought her into the hospital and her awakening in the personality of Honey. She had no memory of Suzanne.
Recovery was rapid. Within two weeks she was released in his care. She had gained the fifteen pounds she had lost when she had refused to eat because they wouldn't call her Suzanne.
Happy and carefree as a child she scampered on the lawn of the hotel he checked into in San Francisco. She thought she was going home with him. She had no memory of Donna or of Kelly Carlisle. Stubbornly, he was going to try to bring back her memory himself, against the advice of the therapists, the psychologist, the psychiatrist. If he failed, he would check her into a private hospital where they wouldn't tie her down, where they would call her Suzanne if she wanted to be called Suzanne. He couldn't stand the sight of her arms and her neck, so skinny before she put the weight back on.
It took him a month. He was surprised as she was when site remembered everything. She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked at him with big sad eyes. "Oh, my God! Hollywood!"
"Don't worry. You're a valuable piece of merchandise, Honey Lou. They've given out the story that you've got some kind of strange disease. It was lucky it happened in between pictures."
Her face on his chest, her hands rubbing up and down his belly, reaching now and then for his prick. "Mike, listen. Wil1 that happen to me again?"
"I don't know."
"If you could take me home with you it wouldn't happen again, Mike."
"You think so. Maybe you're right. But you know we can't do that. There's Donna and the babies to think of. And Gwennie and all of them and Aunt Laura. Incest isn't something people can live with, Honey. It isn't like cancer, which you can't help, or even being a lush. Nobody can accept incest."
She giggled. "You ever stop to think how much it sounds like insect? They've got a repellent for all kinds of insects. Why don't they invent a magic push-button spray can that'll stamp out incest like they can stamp out insects?"
He held her close to him and sighed. "Honey, where is Kelly?"
"I don't know. Someplace shooting it up with heroin, I suppose."
"Honey, didn't it work out at all between you?"
"For a while." Her hand grabbed his pubic hairs, tugging lightly. "But he just wasn't you, Mike. Nobody's you." She released his hair and found his prick, holding it firmly. She looked at it. "See, he missed me. He likes me to do this to him. He's hungry for my lips, isn't he? Let me suck him now." She moved in a fluid graceful turn and put her mouth to the tip of it, smiling with delight.
He sank into the rapturous wonder of her soft mouth, her sucking, her eager throat ready to receive him and he marveled at the ease with which he could throw off all his guilt, reveling in what she was doing with every inch of his body. Even his fingernails tingled with the pure drowning ecstasy of it. She stopped before he came and he looked at her, shocked, as she climbed onto his belly and screwed her cunt down against his loins, sliding down the pole. She bent down and kissed him and his tongue reached inside his mouth, tasting of his own juice.
"I'm starved for you," she said, raising her thighs up, poised for the deep fall. Falling against his chest she began to jettison her hips down against him, murmuring into the flesh of her neck, biting it, whimpering, saying meaningless words as she ground her nipples against his chest. Their bodies blended into each other as familiar and right as thread and butter. Her heart fluttered as she panted, choking out her love for him as she came, washing him with the hot flowing juice, drowning his prick as her vagina gobbled and ground and sucked him into her even deeper and deeper.
When she fell into a light sleep, still on top of him and with his prick growing limp inside of her he held her tighter and fought back a sob that would have wracked her into wakefulness.
Dear God, he thought, wondering where his shame was when all he could feel was a great sobbing sorrow for the way things were. And the 'Dear God' a falling back into the old ways of religion when he now knew there was no God to say "dear" to .. .strange that people tend to cling to their early vocabularies along with the teaching of the church. Even someone who was lucky enough? talented?, well, with guts enough, at least, to write plays people proclaimed as brilliant. He had a mind clear and sharp and sure and a way with words that brought thousands to the box office to pay fantastic prices, even more fantastic when they paid a scalper. But there he was with his arms around his sister, his prick in her cunt and thinking, "Dear God."
God is divorced and living in Reno, divorced from all the people who don't believe in him anymore, divorced from the green gage plum. The unbelievably stupid man who still goes to church and worships with his lips while he resents the dollar bill he is putting in the collection plate, And always, don't forget, Dear Abby, with an eye to next year's income tax when he can look his accountant in the eye and say the magic word, "Charity." The Up service of the multitudes who say thou shall not kill, say it in the name of their god and still go out and kill their neighbors; for in the beginning when those people wrote the Bible they were smart enough to know the killing had to be stopped... and were not the people in Viet Nam neighbors?
Yes, and all the evangelists with their alarm clocks up pew asses going off at eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning, Beaking through the reflex action of their bowels Bwjulated by the beating little bell of the alarm clock, �taping off into a half sleep where thoughts came disjointed and mad as Honey was mad, frightening thoughts, which one of them was really insane? Or were both of them? And was there a trace of insanity in the family that their Mormon mother and Mormon father had kept carefully locked away in the closet along with other family secrets like Uncle George who drank coffee and swore Brigham Young or Joseph didn't mean the Scandinavians.. . and Aunt Lucy who didn't keep her house very clean and drank whiskey when she was sick?
But not only the evangelists with their own special brand of bowel motivation. There were the teachers, too, who spoke out of one side of their mouth of democracy and a dream, everything rosy, yes sir, boys and girls. Great land, this America, those slaves were really happy, you betcha, and even now they don't really want to vote and live in decent houses and go to school with white folks. It's these damned agitators, George, with their loud mouths and their infiltrated Commies, and take them Conscientious Objectors, Communists, everyone, all set to overthrow the government and take all our money away, Jim; And have the niggers screwing the white girls on every street corner. You know, don't you, Bob, that the niggers have always had it in mind to screw our wives and sisters and little daughters, too? Hung bigger, you can bet your life on that why, I saw this big black buck and he had a prick on him as big as a quart milk bottle. This is America, Bud, and you better believe it, where we're all free and equal and I'm gonna send my son over to kill everybody to prove it while I take a gun and shoot everybody that thinks different than I do. Wives and children, give them all guns to kill people with because this is the land of the free and we've got to make them all conform. Go to church on Sunday and thank God, brothers, and sisters, that you live in this great big land of ours where everybody can be President and get shot at. Where a man is judged by his color instead of by his ability as a human being, because the birds don't mix it up so that's the way it is. And you don't screw your sister either, and by God you do it and we'll show you what we think of incest, you dirty hippie commie, you, don't you know this is the Land of the Free?
Where her breasts rested heavy against his chest there *as a warm sweat that rose up in a lemony fragrance and wrought back a thousand memories that jolted him out of his word-filled slumber. Her hair was damp and smelled of r-oney, tickling his nose as he buried his face in it and held her tighter. "What arc we going to do?"
"What?"
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake up up. But since you ire awake," he lifted her off of his body and held her in the rook of his arm. She shivered. Pulling the blanket up over rer lovely body he looked into her eyes and was glad that _-iey were clear and amber colored and very much alive.
She yawned. "I'm so happy being just with you, Mike."
"I know. But I've got to go back to Donna, back to the play. I'm into the second act. I've got to finish it within two months."
"Take me with you, Mike." Small voice full of sighs. And tears. The breaking kind. "We've been all through that."
"Mike, listen! Please. I could live in an apartment somewhere and you could come to see me sometimes. I'd ever go out of the apartment if you said so. Honest. I'd promise."
Such a child. Even her speech, in childlike phrases, no relation to the mature woman who filled the screen with mad delight that set every man's prick on fire just to look it her and hear her voice.
"What about your career? You know you'd miss acting."
"No, I wouldn't. I don't care if I never see another lot, mother camera, another make-up woman, another customer. I don't really like to act, Mike. Really! All I want is to be with you. Even if it was just once in a while."
"I tell you it wouldn't work, Honey." Exasperated. "Sooner or later word would get out and we'd all be crucified."
"You don't love me. You never did."
"No, Honey, don't start that."
Her face came up and went down on his chest, her mouth opening to his flesh, her teeth sharp, biting, drawing the blood.
"God damn! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
She drew her head away, looking down at him, grinning, his blood on her lips. "Sometimes I think I could find peace if you were dead, Mike. Like, if I killed you, for instance. Then I wouldn't know you were here on earth someplace. You'd be down in the ground with dirt on top of you and I'd knon I couldn't get to you, so I'd be all right. Did you ever think of killing me, Mike?"
"Once. Twice. Maybe more. I don't know."
"Mike, you don't really like Donna, your wife, do you? And those babies of hers?"
"In a way I like Donna very much, Honey. The babies, well, they're so little and just born. I think it takes a while to get attached to kids. Like dogs and cats. But I'll grow to love them."
"Will you love them as much as you do me? Ever?"
He felt the tenseness in her body and swearing at himself for all his chicken-livered selfish reasons known and unknown even to himself he told her of course he would never, could never love anybody the way he loved her.
He realized that she had been talking to him for some time, telling him about the drug she took when she began hearing the voices or seeing the other Honey who wasn't there, answering his question that he had forgotten he had asked her. Sitting there on the rumpled bed with her face against dried come. "So I don't think hearing from Kelly had anything to do with 'setting me off.' You see, I'm always 'off.' It's just that most of the time I can keep in control of it. But then I get down so low. You can't imagine how I feel."
"Yes, I can. What did Kelly have to say?" "He's starting a new group. He's off of the speed. He asked me to send him some money, so I did. He divorced me two years ago, you know."
"No. I didn't know it. Why didn't you let me know?" "It didn't matter that much. He's got a new girl he's interested in. Going to make her a star, he says. I called him after I got the letter. He'd put his telephone number in it just in case I wanted to call him. He sounded all right. Do people ever get off dope once they've been on it?"
"I think so. Some of them. If they have an incentive." "How old are those kids of Donna's now, Mike?" "The girls are three years old. And they're my kids, too. Would you like to see their pictures? Donna had new ones made on their birth ..."
She cut him off with a shrill Scream, holding her ears so she couldn't hear anymore. "No. I don't want to see their picture. You know how I feel about those little monsters." He sighed. "What would you like to do?" "Go to the zoo. Eat popcorn. Walk in the rain if it starts raining again. Go to a movie and eat gum drops and drink orange pop. Just... be with you."
"Honey, I know you don't like it when I lecture you, but you can't go back and pick up the past and hold it up close to you forever. We've both got responsibilities in this world. I've brought children into the world. I've got obligations to my agent and the people who are willing to produce my plays. You're under contract to your studio. You can't hang around Chicago and do things we did when we were in our teens."
"What you're doing is, you're telling me you want to leave me now. We've balled for a while and now you've got to go back to that Amazon bitch you married." Her chin quivered. "All right, Mike. So go." She put her head down on her knees. She was utterly still.
Her defeated little figure frightened him. So did her words. Once before she had told him to go.
Chapter VII
ALL THE SINISTER THREATS OF A CRAZED YOUTH shooting down people from a bell tower were in those two words of hers, "So go." Headlines screamed through his mind. BERSERK GUNMAN SHOOTS DOWN ELEVEN. SABOTAGED PLANE KILLS FORTY. CRAZED KILLER KNIFES FIVE.
"I'll stay a while, Honey. I didn't mean I was leaving just this second. I just meant that you've got to face the fact that I can't stay forever. Sooner or later I have to get back." He stretched out alongside her on the bed.
Honey lifted her head from her knees and smiled at him. "I think I'll take a nice hot bath." He watched her dimpled ass disappear into the bathroom door, aware of the door closing, of the rushing sound of water as she filled the tub, of the scent of lemon creeping out from under the door.
God yes, he told himself. He'd have to stay with her if she was going to take that attitude. That "so go" made his blood run cold.
She remembered, too. As she eased her right foot into the hot water she remembered what she had done, grinning down at her breasts, patting them gently, thinking of Lizzie Bordon who had taken an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. "I'm crazy. Really crazy." She slowly sank her left foot into the water and stood there with her legs sunk in the water up to her knees, very very hot, and the rest of her hesitating, knowing it would be too hot, but liking it anyway. "Yes, without a doubt. I'm really crazy. Because if he left me again this quick I'd do it again." ' Ever so slowly she sank her buttocks into the lemon scented water, gasping as it came up to her waist.
"Absolutely. I'd do it again and maybe this time I'd manage to do a good job. And I'd get off, too. I'm nuts. They don't hang insane people. Or do they hang people in New York? Let's see. The electric chair in Illinois and Ohio, gas chamber in California and Nevada, where do they hang people for murder? I must bone up on that. Hanging would hurt." She touched her throat, shuddering at the imagined feel of a rope around its delicate softness.
It would serve him right, though. She smiled and picked up the yellow bar of soap and carefully rubbed it against the washcloth, working up a good lather. She looked down at the soap and smiled again, rubbing off the 'N' in her name embossed on the soap.
That had been an interesting three months. And then there was a year of hell. She'd never have done it if he hadn't left her so quickly after he came to Denver to meet her that time.
At first she hadn't really believed he had gone. She'd stayed there in the hotel room for a whole day, waiting for j him to come back, to tell her he'd just been kidding her. ! And then she'd realized he had meant it. The plan occurred to her, but she put it out of her mind. It was too terrible. Too frightening. She'd dressed that day in Denver and gone out into the bright snow, blinking her eyes against the dazzle of the sun shining on the surface. Denver was beautiful in the winter.
She thought she'd said it herself, but then she realized a woman had spoken to her. She smiled and said it certainly was.
The woman had reached out a hand and touched her. "Aren't you Honey Sheridon, the movie actress?"
"Oh, no!" she lied, laughing at anything so ridiculous.
"Funny. You look just like her."
"My goodness, a lot of people have told me that, but when you get her picture up next to mine you can see the difference." She looked at the woman, taking in her lovely tailored western clothing complete with western boots and a beautiful calfskin jacket. "Is there a parade or something going on?" she asked, walking along with her.
"No. Why do you ask?"
"Your clothes."
"Oh, I live in clothes like this. I seldom wear a dress if I can help it."
It was then that Honey noticed the woman's hair, cut short like a man's and the added fact that her slim slacks had a fly in the front. Fags were old hat. There were plenty in Hollywood, plenty standing in line to get their pricks chopped off and a cunt made by the plastic surgeon who was doing a land office sex-change business. Several times certain women in the industry had been rumored to be homosexual, but none of them had ever gotten close enough to Honey to talk to her. The idea of having a woman make love to her excited her. Maybe she was wrong about this woman; but she certainly walked like a man, talked like a man and wore clothes like a man. "I'm a stranger here," she said. "I wonder if you could tell me where I might find a bar where I could have a drink. Alone. Without, you know, having men get the wrong impression."
The woman looked at her strangely. "What kind of a place did you have in mind? Something straight?"
Honey knew the language of the gay world. She looked squarely into the brown eyes. "No. I didn't have something straight in mind."
A slow smile lit the woman's face. She was really very attractive in a masculine way. She leaned a little closer to Honey. "I'm going to a nice place myself. Would you care to have that drink with me?"
"Why not?"
They had four drinks and all the while Mildred Frisbee was the perfect host. Certainly not a hostess. In every sense of the word she was the man. Her billfold whipped out of her back pocket to pay for the drinks. Honey's cigarettes were lit for her before they were hardly out of the package and into her mouth. After the fourth drink was finished she said in her husky voice, "Would you care to go to a party?"
Honey had no illusions about how many people would attend the party. "I thought you'd never ask me." She told Mildred her name was Betty.
Mildred lived in a luxury apartment, high on a hill. Her eyes were hot as she watched Honey undress. Her hands grasped for the big deceptively soft looking breasts as she kept up a steady stream of conversation, laughing, saying she had only hoped that Honey wasn't straight.
"God, the men I've had turned me off," said Honey, acting and enjoying it. "My first husband was a bastard. All he did was want to screw-screw-screw, never knowing or caring whether I got any good out of it. I never did, of course. And then my second one, ohhhm that feels good!"
Mildred had maneuvered her over to the couch and had her down on it, sucking one of her breasts while her hand steadily squeezed the nipple of the other one. Taking her mouth away, she looked down at Honey's face with a smile of delight, saying, "What a sweet tit you've got, I've never seen a girl with such sweet ones. Turn over, honey, so I can get a look at your ass. I was in such a hurry to get your clothes off that I didn't stop to look at you all over."
Her hands explored every inch of Honey's lush body, tenderly, gently, sweetly, and suddenly they were taken away while she stripped off her own clothes exposing a hard muscular body with almost no breasts at all and slender hips, slender as a man's. Her pubic hair was the same light brown as her hair and it was a shock to Honey to see it without a big prick sticking out of it, Mildred seemed so much like a man.
"Kiss me, sweetie," said Mildred, coming down hard with her mouth on Honey's. Her tongue intruded between Honey's startled teeth, pushing them aside and she was startled at the size of it, excited and surprised both, knowing where that tongue would eventually be. Slowly, Mildred swooped downward, devouring her breasts again with a greedy mouth, sucking like a man. A chill of revulsion ran through her as the question seered her mind. 'What am I dooing here? Me. With a Lesbian." But she remained still allowed Mildred to raise her legs upward, propping one against the back of the couch and the other one down on the floor, exposing her cunt.
Mildred's hands were shaking in her excitement, the words bubbling out of her mouth in a never-ending wonder at all that beauty. Then her mouth was seeking her clitoris, encircling it with her pointed tongue, making little lapping j motions hard against it. For a long time she kept up the ; gentle sucking pressure, alternating it with the lapping j questing tongue and then her teeth found it and bit down, not hard, not painfully, but firmly, holding it in her teeth for a second and sending electric shivers throughout Honey's body. It was as though she was suspended in a high place of desperation full of erotic sensations, a place of nothingness that was at the same time all things. Slowly the teeth released the throbbing clit and she came, panting and tense. Released, yet disappointed. She'd wanted the fuL treatment. The deep fulfillment of a vaginal climax and she felt cheated, but she didn't say anything. Mildred's dark head remained where it was, her hands at that soft place where Honey's legs joined her thighs, as if she were taking Honey's pulse with both hands. Then her head went down lower, her tongue soft and thick as it licked the delicate pink flesh surrounding her vagina. Honey moaned "Stop a while." "No, I can't."
"But I haven't the strength." "Yes, you have. I'll go slow. Easy. You'll see." The thick hot tongue did go slow and easy, a fifteen minute stint of steady lapping, her hands working gently into the delicious body under her. Honey's hands went to her breasts, holding them down. They seemed to want to reach out, to disengage themselves from her body, their nipples aching for the touch of something to accompany the nerve-tingling sensations down below. A finger found her clit and her legs convulsed for a second at the touch of that finger over tissue so recently used. It felt ragged and sore for that instant when her legs convulsed and then it felt hot and ready under the steady pressure of the finger, wet in the sexjuice that came pouring out. Another hand crept under her ass, she felt it in her half-dazed anxious-for-everything craving. Felt the finger encircling her asshole, tentatively, like a little soft thing thinking of entering and then the thick tongue went into her vagina and began to beat against the walls and Honey waited tensely for the finger to go into her asshole, desiring it with a funneling anxiousness. The teasing kept on for a while, encircling her anus, tickling a little, while the other finger kept up its slow-motion ecstasy on her clit and Honey's hips began to swivel wildly, feeling that gigantic hard tongue flailing her on the inside of her cunt, feeling that expert woman's finger masturbating her clit, and finally the soft probing of the finger in her ass, filling her completely. "Ohhh!" she cried out, beating her ass against the couch, reaching upwards in the next second with her pelvis, wanting the sensation to go on and on forever, the finger deep in her ass, probing, the other finger hard and demanding on her clit, the thick tongue going round and round inside her channel. The orgasm started in her belly, shivering through her navel and reaching upwards with tentacles of sweet fire to her breasts, rocking her mightily as it gushed through her genital area. She flopped like a fish as she reached it, completely aware of the sucking movement of her asshole against the finger, the throbbing heartbeat of the rest of her flowing outwards in ecstasy.
She lay there panting and sobbing. "So this is it." The tears fell down the sides of her face and she was helpless to do anything about them. Tears of shame, maybe, mingled with tears of release. She sat up and Mildred kissed her breasts, softly and sweetly. "You've never had a woman before, have you?"
"No."
"It was wonderful, wasn't it?" "Oh yes!"
Mildred's arms went around her, crushing her face to her flat breasts. "I'll worship you. I'll be so good to you, I'll take care of you, listen. I've got money. Lots of it. You won't have to work for a living, you can stay with me and I'll take care of you and you'll never have to have a man touch you again, you don't want a man to take you again, do you? A man doesn't know how to give a woman what she wants." She spoke in a low and urgent voice, all the time kissing Honey's limp body, speaking in between sentences, promising her all sorts of things. "I've been looking for somebody like you all my life, stay with me. sweetheart."
Honey stayed for three months. She learned the expert use of the dildo, a big white rubber one with testicles that squirted out a half cup of warm water into her cunt or Mildred's cunt, whoever happened to be on the bottom. She learned other, exotic things. A pressurized can of whipped cream, the nozzle icy cold against her cringing cunt flesh, the sound it made as Mildred pushed the button on top, the strange sensation of cold whipped cream filling her channel and the delicious strangeness of Mildred eating it out. every drop.
Mildred had a vibrator, a penis-shaped instrument that hurt at first when it was in her, shattering her, causing her to cry out.
"Wait," said Mildred. "You'll like it if you'll lie still." And her channel grew accustomed to the strange vibrating sensation on the inside of her cunt, taking the place of Mildred's tongue leaving her hot lips free to stimulate her clitoris. Softly, Mildred murmured, her lips over the little hard clit, bringing her mouth together and taking it away leaving her clit screaming for more.
The first time she talked herself into eating Mildred she closed her eyes and tried not to think of what she was doing, aware only of the smell of Mildred's sex scent, not unpleasant, but strange, with the fragrance of almonds and crushed green grass. The taste was bitter and harsh on her tongue but she forced herself to go on, telling herself that she owed it to Mildred, had owed it for a long time. It had taken her two weeks to get up enough courage to reciprocate, to play the part of the man. It remained distasteful to her and she called herself a hypocrite. You love it when she does it to you, she told herself angrily, so why shouldn't you do it to her? Why shouldn't you want to, after all?
Mildred didn't press her into it. She seemed content enough to give Honey the strange pleasures of all her instruments and all her fleshy talents, freely and without a single demand for like treatment for herself.
But Honey couldn't learn to like returning all that goodness. She was too aware of what she was doing, of the degrading, humble position she had to take when she reciprocated. All the time her mind went on, even as she grew expert under Mildred's gentle guidance. She told herself she was a selfish beast, that she would soon learn to like it, but she never did. During the latter part of her third month with Mildred she began to hear the voices again and was frightened, groping in the bottom of her handbag for the pills and going into a sweating panic because she was out of them.
One voice was distinct, above all the others. "What a bitch you are, Honey Lou. Do away with yourself."
"No!" she whined, cowering on the floor, her hands covering her ears to block out the sound. But the sound went on inside of her head, increasing in volumn. She left the apartment like a sleepwalker and walked, walked, until her feet were sore and blistered, listening to the noise of the traffic, the honking horns, the laughter of children, the noise of the city. At dusk she found an outside telephone booth and called her doctor in Hollywood, demanding that he send her a prescription for the pills that kept her sane. "Where are you?"
"In the telephone booth somewhere in Denver, Colorado."
"Don't you live in a hotel, an apartment, someplace where I could get in touch with you? I can't very well call a druggist and ask to have the pills delivered to a telephone booth somewhere in Denver."
"I can't go back there," she said, shrill voice wailing into the telephone. "They're going to try to kill me back there Don't you see that? My life is in danger."
"Calm down. Nobody's trying to kill you, Honey." Through his voice came the threatening voices of all the people who had been trying to get through to her and Mildred herself loomed large outside the booth, a big twelve foot tall Mildred, her face distorted as the face in the mirrors at the fun houses are distorted, her mouth working strangely. Spoiled fish with maggots squirming around inside them were coming out of her mouth. She screamed and looked at the enormous Mildred with the obscene mouth, her eyes searching the lighted sky over Denver and settling, madly, cunningly, on a drugstore sign. Kings Drugs ... She shouted the name of the drugstore into the mouthpiece and hung up, slumping to the floor of the booth and staring upwards in horror through the glass of the door into Mildred's vibrating cunt. Out of her cunt came twenty-one blackbirds, she counted them. A Christmas tree hung with pricks, each of them tied with red and green ribbons that glittered and hurt her eyes, a grand piano with bloody teeth where the keys ought to be and a five piece band playing Onward Christian Soldiers.
She bowed her head. "I'm really crazy this time. Really crazy." She looked out the door again, peeing through her fingers and saw a tall policeman advancing on her, a comb in his mouth. The voice inside her head said, "He's going to comb out all your pussy hairs with that comb. Then he's going to rake your cunt with the teeth."
She screamed and bolted through the door of the booth, dodging through his legs while he grasped at her with hands that were not hands at all, but small trees, the leaves brushing her as they tried to catch her as she ran all the way to the drugstore where the pills should be.
Rushing in madly, a bell tinkled over the door and there was the comforting drugstore smell of stationary. Chocolate candy, cosmetics and perfume, a soda fountain and all the liver inside the pills brought her back to sanity for a breath of a second. She clutched the counter top, holding on hard, breathing harshly. "My doctor from Hollywood said he'd order some bills for me. Has he called yet?"
The druggist was a short fat man with a white coat on. Normal. At least when she first looked at him. "Not yet," he said. "Are you in pain?"
"In pain?" She looked at him blankly and began to laugh, still holding onto the corner of the counter. "In pain? No, it doesn't hurt to be crazy. Only in my head and you get used to it after a while, you know the pans and the pots drip down out of the faucets, did you know that every hole has got something that'll fit inside of it? You'd be surprised at what holes have put in them. Mouths and pussies and assholes and all that jazz ... oh, look, don't pay any attention to me, I'm just nuts. But I won't hurt anybody, honest. Just let me sit down here at the counter, I'll have a cup of coffee if you won't put any poison in it. "That telephone call will come in pretty soon and you'll see. It's a new drug they've got out to control people like me, to keep us from hearing voices, but don't please don't call a policeman, they've all got the clapp."
She heard the druggist talking in a low voice to somebody in back of the counter, a high one she couldn't see over the top of. As she continued to clutch the edge of the counter she became aware of a warmth seeping through her and realized she had been very cold. The telephone rang shrilly as two pairs of hands put one cup of coffee in front of her with sugar and cream, already stirred. She couldn't see the face or the body that belonged to the two sets of hands, but it seemed quite natural that a disembodied body with two sets of hands should be serving her coffee and saying in a low voice, "Take it easy, miss."
The coffee was sweet and hot and with the first sip her sanity returned again. It was funny about that, she told herself as she drank half of it in a gulp. Funny how a cold shower or a hot bathrub would help for a while. Ice cream, hot soup, cold earth under bare feet or even a plunge into the swimming pool would bring her back from the brink for a few seconds.
"The trouble with my kind of insanity is," she said distinctly, "that I know when I'm going off." She wanted more coffee but somebody came and got her and led her back into a little room where there was a green couch with red roses on it and the druggist, it was the druggist, wasn't it? He was shoving the bright purple capsules into her mouth, insisting that she drink the water quickly.
Within minutes the room stopped looking at her with lust and the druggist was no longer fat. Just pleasantly stocky, and his face was kind as he asked her if she was feeling better.
"Yes, oh, yes."
"Your doctor in Hollywood suggested you either return there immediately or check yourself into a private hospital."
"No. I'll be all right if you'll give me the rest of the pills. I've got a brother back East. He'll take care of me." She looked into his pleasant now-I've-seen-everything-face-and added, "I hope I didn't say or do anything terrible. You see, I can feel these things coming on, but without the pills I just came unglued."
"You were fine. Fine. Honey Sheridon, imagine that. Quite an honor, Miss Sheridon, to have you in my store."
"You won't let it get out that I have these spells? It'd kill my career. And they can be kept under control."
"Of course not. You can depend on me."
A half hour later she was getting out of a taxi and heading for the ticket office that would take her to New York and Mike, whether he wanted her or not.
And thinking, as she got on the plane, it would be relatively easy to kill those babies. And Donna, too. They'd never do a thing to me. Lock me up for a while, maybe. But they'd let me go. After a while. I'd be very good, very docile, very humble, very sorry, and then Mike would be free of the three of them and we'd be happy together. Yes, I was very off my rocker back there but I'm thinking straight now.
It would serve Mike right, anyway. He should never have left me when I told him to go. He knew better than that. She would have to be very thorough, of course. And not let him know she was anyplace around New York. If she did that chances were she could kill them all and get away with it. She began to look around the plane for some likely man who wouldn't mind shacking up with her for a while in order to provide a smokescreen. Nobody was very promising. All the men were old and taken. And she would never have another woman. She was convinced that Mildred had set her off, driven her crazy. At LaGuardia she ate a good meal in the dining room before she called and reserved a hotel room under Mildred's name. Smiling sweetly, she signed the register and offered to pay in advance because she had no luggage. "I think it got lost on the plane," she said. "Maybe be in tomorrow."
The woman clerk accepted her money for a week in advance and had a bellman show her to her room. When she saw the bed she realized how tired she was. She slept for eighteen hours without moving and when she awakened she remembered very clearly just what her plan was.
It was, after all, Mike's fault. He should never have left her when she didn't want to be left. She made several telephone calls and three hours later she was wearing a dark wig that covered her trademark hair, a pair of studious looking glasses and a wishy-washy face that could have belonged to anybody. Driving a rented car, she parked across the street from Mike's house, watching the comings and goings of the neighbors on the suburban street. She realized she could fool Donna-after all, the bitch had never seen her-but could she fool Mike himself? She doubted it, and supposed he was inside that brick house, enclosed in the private room of his writing womb, engrossed in whatever play he happened to be writing. She wished he had stayed with law so he would be forced to go to an office like other men. She could then kill his wife and children when he was gone. Driving on, she went around the block and parked on the same side of the street as Mike's house, four houses down from his entrance.
She kept taking the pills and remaining what she considered sane as she waited, day by day, for Mike-and hopefully Donna-to come out of the house and go somewhere, but it didn't happen for three days and when somebody came out to do something other than take in the paper or check the mailbox, it was Donna. Wearing slacks and looking very efficient.
As Honey watched, Donna got into her Buick and rolled away with Honey right behind her. She followed her all the way to the supermarket, where she parked in the parking lot right next to the Buick and waited until Donna came out with a box boy and a grocery cart, every inch the housewife.
Sneering, Honey followed the Buick all the way home and waited again in front of another house, hoping nobody was getting suspicious. Before long-and it had been three days-Donna came out again and got behind the wheel of the Buick while at the same time a fat lady got out of a Rambler and went up the walk. Deciding the woman was a babysitter and now was her chance to kill the twins, she waited impatiently for Mike to come out and get into his Ti-Bird, dressed for golf. She wondered where Donna had gone but decided now was her chance, killing a couple of babies shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, she could get at Donna later.
Her palms were wet with sweat as she gripped the steering wheel, forcing herself to wait five minutes more after Mike left. Then she got out of the car and opened the gate, walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell. The fat woman came to the door. "Yes?"
"I'm Donna's sister," she said. "I thought I'd surprise her."
"Oh?" The woman opened the door so Honey could come in. "Well, she's gone to the beauty shop to get her hair done and the mister's gone to play a round or so of golf."
Honey grinned. "And where are my darling nieces?" "They're asleep. But they sleep real sound. Would you like to see them?"
"Oh, yes, if it isn't too much trouble. It's been so long since I've seen the little angels."
Honey looked down on their dark baby faces, at their tufts of dark hair and thought they would look much more appealing as little corpses.
She went out of the room, keeping a beautiful smile on her face. "I'd be willing to pay you for the whole afternoon," reaching into her purse and bringing out a sheaf of bills. "I'd just love to take care of them if they woke up before Donna comes home."
The fat woman eyed the bills. "Well, it doesn't seem exactly right..."
"Oh, go on. How much? Fifteen dollars?" "Well, I ... guess that'd be all right." She shoved three five dollar bills into the woman's hand and watched her leave, still smiling sweetly and telling her she was glad to have come at a time when everybody was gone so she could get her fill of loving the little angels if they woke up.
Then she went into the bedroom and looked around for something to bash those soft little six or seven month old beads in with. Her hand tried out a heavy marble ashtray for size. It seemed heavy enough. Her arm was raised into the air and about to come down in a crashing arc on one little head when the door opened and the fat woman grabbed her arm with one hand and squeezed hard, dragging her away from the crib and causing the ash tray to fall harmlessly to the rug.
"I was just ..." Honey stared at the woman blankly.
"I know what you were just..." said the woman. "You're a nut. You are not more Donna's sister than I am. Donna hasn't got any sister. You think I didn't know that? I've worked for Donna off and on ever since she came to New York after her and Mike was married. Now you just lie down there on the floor while I call the police."
"No, no! Don't call the police. Call the place where Mike's playing golf. He'll come right home and tell you this has all been a mistake. I wouldn't hurt those babies."
"Not much, you wouldn't," said the woman, holding her firmly to the floor. "Lay still while I get something to tie you up with. You think I'd trust you after what I just saw?"
The woman had nothing. No weapon. No gun to threaten her. She giggled and made her body lie still while the woman rummaged into drawers for something to tie her with. Taking the only chance she thought she might have, she leapt up and flew out the door, reaching into her pocket for the car keys as she ran. The woman tackled her as she was leaving the front door. She felt a whistling rush of wind and then a hard jab to the side of her head. Then she felt nothing more until she came to in a dimly lit hospital room, Mike pacing the floor at the side of the bed.
Chapter Eight
WHAT'S WRONG, MIKE?"
He stopped at her words and stared down at her. "Yeah, baby. What's wrong! What's wrong, she asks, looking up at me from her little white bed, her eyes all innocent as a "Am I sick again?"
"Are you sick again? You mean you don't know what you did... you don't know at all? Or are you just pretending you don't know what you did? You almost killed my kids!"
"No, I didn't. That woman stopped me."
He sat down in the bedside chair, all the air of his anger suddenly gone out of him. "Well, at least you aren't going to pretend that you weren't aware of what was going on. Honey Lou. Do you know where you are?"
"Not exactly." She looked at the room, at the hospital bedside table, at the hospital green of the walls, at the white hospital spread over her high bed. There were sides to her bed. Metal bar sides. The kind people put babies in, or old senile people ... or mental patients. There were bars at the windows. "Mike. You didn't put me in an insane asylum."
"They don't call them that anymore."
"What's the difference what they call them. A euphemism is an euphemism, after all. I'm in a nut house, You can call it a mental hospital if you want to."
"It's better than a goddamn jail! If Donna had her way you'd be in jail right now. For attempted murder."
"Oh. Well... yes. I can see your point. The lesser of two evils, huh?"
"Oh, shit. You don't even care that you were going to kill my kids, do you? You don't give a damn, do you? You think everything's fine and dandy and pretty soon you'll get out and go your merry way so you can come back and try it again, don't you?" He stood up and leaned over the bed. "Well, I've got news for you, and you listen closely. Everything isn't just fine and dandy. You're going to stay here until they think you're well enough to go out in the world and be around other human beings. Honey Lou, don't you realize that it was two human lives you were about to take?"
"It wouldn't be the first time. I took another one, remember? That Thanksgiving Day. You burned it up."
He collapsed in the chair and put his head in his hands. "Yes. You're right. Sometimes I wonder if you're sane and I'm the one who's ..."
"Nuts," she supplied cheerfully. "Well, the thing of it is, Mike, you shouldn't have left me that time in Denver. Seems ages ago now. But I don't think it's been anymore than three months."
"Yes. Three months. With Hollywood calling me every day. Jesus Christ, you were right in the middle of a picture! Just walked out! Well, they've taken you off of it. Nobody knew where you were, nobody, not even me, and then suddenly there you were back from wherever you'd been, trying to kill my little girls. Great. And you lie there acting like what you did was perfectly normal!"
"Oh, well, I don't think I was behaving in a perfectly normal way. I never did think I was perfectly normal. Did you?" She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at him searchingly. "How about a cigarette. Jesus Christ, my head hurts. Did she crack it? It feels like it." She out a hand up and felt the bandage on her scalp. "Damn. Half of my hair's gone. Well, how about the goddamn cigarette, or do I have to get down on my hands and knees and beg you for one?"
"Here." He lit it and stuck it into her mouth. "I'm going home. I waited until you regained consciousness. They x-rayed and there's no concussion. They took three stitches."
Tears sprang into her eyes. She reached out for him with one hand holding the cigarette in the other one. "Oh, don't go. Don't leave me all alone in this place, Mike."
"In the first place, I want to go." His eyes were hard and unforgiving. "In the second place, a nurse will be in here in about three minutes and when she finds out you're awake and talking she'll chase me out of the room. I was only allowed to stay until you came out of it."
She sat up. "When'll you be back?"
"I won't be. You're to have no visitors. Nobody at all, do you understand? Not until you're well."
"I'll never get well. How can I? I'm only really well when I have you to screw me. Sometimes I'm a little bit well when I have somebody else to screw me. Who the hell do you think I can screw here, another nut?" "I couldn't care less. Listen. We've both made a lot of mistakes. I'll take all the blame. I was older than you were when it first started. I should have kept it from happening.
I didn't, so I can say it's my fault and I mean it. But the thing of it is, you've got to start with where you are now, understand? The past has nothing to do with the future, nor does it have anything to do with the now. They ... I've been talking to the man who's going to be your therapist. That's the way they do it any more. I mean, it's a new concept. The past doesn't matter, don't you see? Because it's already over and done with and there's no changing it so now the psychologists are looking at mental illness in a new way. Starting with the patient where she is and going from there."
"Great," she said flatly. "Fantastic. Beautiful. Gorgeous, But it won't work for me. I know it won't."
"Not with that attitude."
The nurse came in. "Good evening, Miss Sheridon."
Honey's eyes grew round with horror. "Mike!! She knows my name! What'll this do to my career?"
"You won't have any career if you don't get well. You'll have to stay here the rest of your life. And the only way you can get well is to cooperate."
"But everybody in Hollywood'll know I'm off my rocker!" she wailed.
"No, they won't," said the nurse. "You'll be well protected here."
Mike went to the doorway. He turned around before he left the room. Raising his hand up he shook his index finger at her. "Just remember Honey Lou, you don't get out of here until they figure you can function on your own as a member of society. If you try anything like escaping out the fire exit or something, you'll go to jail. Donna has a warrant out for arrest and she'll not rest until she sees you in jail.. unless you're locked up in a hospital. And I had to talk like a son of a gun to get her to let me put you her in Roselawn."
He didn't say goodbye. She turned her face to the nurse who was filling her pitcher with ice water. She made a face "Roselawn! Sounds like a cemetery."
"It could be a lot worse," said the nurse. "This is a private hospital. Supposing you were in Bellevue."
"I don't like pollyanna people. Christ! You're one of those people who'd say it could be a lot worse if I woke up and had my legs cut off. You'd say at least they didn't amputate my pussy!"
"I don't care whether you like pollyanna people or not Miss Sheridon. I'm your nurse and I hope you'll like me. I'll be with you every night from five until one in the morning. At that time you'll be sleeping and you won't need a nurse until you're awake. My name is Ellen Parker."
"Okay. What's the day nurse like?"
"Very nice. A good nurse] Her name's Wanda Mirchell" After she finished straightening the pillows and smoothing the bedclothes the nurse left the room. "If you want me for anything you'll find the button on the wall in back of your bed. It's a green one."
"What's the red one for?"
"Emergency. But it's disconnected. Good night, Miss Sheridon." Her quiet shoes whispered as she closed tbe door.
Honey cried. After she was finished crying she picked up a magazine from the stack on the nightstand and leafed through it, seeing nothing. In her mind was a song, the Cuckoo song, she thought, and she could hear somebody out of her past that she couldn't quite place singing it, but whoever it was singing it was doing the parody.
There they were, there they were He was fihgerfucking her And the cuckoo in the clock went, "cuckoo" Cuckoo for you, Cuckoo for me The voice stopped abruptly and went into another one to the tune of The Girl I Left Behind Me: Oh, the white of an egg ran down the leg Of the girl I left behind me. I jumped her once, and I jumped her twice And 1 jumped her once too often. And I broke the mainspring in her ass And now she's in her coffin.
Warts on a ducks butt. Quack quack.
She pushed the green button, instantly the nurse came in.
"Yes?"
"Somebody's in here singing dirty songs to me." "Where? I don't see anybody."
"You wouldn't. They aren't here. Right in the room. They're in my head. I can hear it plain as day. Get me my pills."
"Doctor McBride didn't order any medication for you, Mess Sheridon."
Sitting up in bed Honey yelled, "Well, I like that! What do you expect me to do, lie here all night long while I listen to dirty songs? I'll go out of my mind, don't you know that?"
"Really!"
She looked into Ellen Parker's eyes and saw something like mirth, something like compassion. At the same time she caught the inflection in the nurse's voice combined with what she had just said ... that she'd go out of her mind. She laughed. "All right. I get the point. Not even a sleeping pill? My head hurts something awful. Something for that pain, maybe?"
"You'll get another injection at about midnight. Goodnight, again."
When the door was closed, she spoke out loud. "Boy, these bastards are going to give me the full treatment."
She attempted to read again and nothing made sense. Across the room a little man about seven inches high came marching out a wall socket. In his hand he carried a miniature martini glass. "I propose a toast," he said, smiling at her and climbing up the leg of her bed.
"Go away," she answered, staring at him. He was really terribly ugly. He looked like a grasshopper in his face, a very solemn one, with the martini glass in his hand somehow adding to his solemn bearing.
He ignored her and raised the glass high just as he stood on her belly.
"Here's to Castro, that son of a bitch May he grow old with the seven year itch. And when he is broken, a syphillitic wreck, I hope his balls fall through his asshole And break his goddamn neck." The grasshopper face broke into a grotesquely sad little grin as the little figure tossed off the tiny martini and threw the glass over his shoulder. Then he began to jump up and down on her belly and it tickled. She swatted him off the way she would have swatted at a pesky fly because it tickled her belly and he fell to the floor. She looked down to see if he was still there, but he wasn't. In his place was a seven inch long prick, bright poisonous green and out of the end was spurting tobacco juice, like the grasshoppers of her childhood spat.
She turned over and shut her eyes, telling herself nothing was really there. She listened to the rushing pounding beat of her heart. Slowly, she turned back over and looked on the floor, peeking down ever so carefully, and the prick was gone. "See there I told you all the time it wasn't real." But it had looked real. The whole thing. But the voices were gone. On the ceiling were a million butterflies, all of them screwing. Yellow ones, red ones, black ones and purple ones. She shut her eyes again and put her hands over then: wishing for morning to come. She held her breath, wondering if she could kill herself by holding it long enough but all that did was make her dizzy and make her head hurt worse. Crying again, she sobbed herself to sleep.
She was being wrapped in something soft and gauzy and somewhere close by they were playing a funeral march. Up above, floating around in the sky, she looked down on herself in the coffin and realized that she had died, that they were holding her funeral. It hadn't hurt at all to die and it would serve Mike right. She couldn't remember just why she was angry with him, but she was very happy looking down at her beautiful self wrapped in all that gauze, except it wasn't gauze, it was a soft silken negligee of palest honey color to match her name and her hair. It was lovely, but somebody awakened her with a cheerful voice and told her to wash her face and hands and get ready for breakfast.
"Breakfast! Yee Gods! In the middle of the night?"
"It's eight-thirty. We're a little late this morning."
She shrieked. "Late! Christ sakes! I never get out of bed until at least noon."
"You know, that's too bad. When you go home, honey, you can do to suit yourself."
The brown girl looked at her as she handed her the washcloth. "Go on, honey. Wash. I haven't got all day. I've got fifty patients to attend to."
"What's my doctor like?" she asked as she bathed her face in warm water. "McBride, I think the nurse said last right. Is he a Scotsman? I never did care for Scottish people."
"No way," said the aide, "at least if he is, he isn't much of a Scot Least, he doesn't look like it." The girl giggled. "You'll find out. I like him. Most everybody likes Doctor McBride."
She was having a little difficulty in hearing the girl speak. Other voices from other places were intruding into their conversation making it difficult for her to pick out the words she thought were real. After the aide left a big woman came in and plopped down a tray, stomping and clanging and banging, and talking in a loud voice as if she were talking to a retarded child or a mute or a foreigner.
"Now you eat every bite of this breakfast, because not eating isn't going to get you any special favors, you might as well understand that right off the bat."
"Very well," said Honey in her Queen of Sweden voice, a part she had played and been nominated for the academy award for best actress. As she ate the poached eggs and crisp bacon and sliced oranges and toast she had to admit the food was good. When she settled back into the bed with her cigarette and coffee she began to wonder if the breakfast had been real, if the coffee was real, if the cigarette was real, if indeed, this whole hospital scene was real. The bed rose and fell, but not alarmingly so, and it was better than the voices. Sun shone brightly outside the window and she wondered what day it was, whether it was spring or summer or winter or fall and tried to think back ... it had been snowing in Colorado when she had met Mildred. Three months with her, that added up to ... yes, it had to be spring outside the window. She had never heard of Roselawn but she knew it must be someplace close to New York. Were there yellow daffodils out there blooming somewhere, were children walking through a park and picking dandelions? Were the weeping willow trees turning that green gold color and was the sky full of spring kites attached to little boys down on the ground looking up and wishing they were soaring along in the sky with their kites?
The morning was long and boring with nurses coming in to change her bed the only thing to break the monotony and then there was lunch, as good as breakfast and she asked everybody she saw if Doctor McBride was nice. They all told her he was, so she imagined he was an old and ugly ogre with white hair growing out of his ears, cataracts over his eyes and a pink bald head, highly polished with Johnson's wax. He'd probably clear his throat and bring up great gobs of slimy phlegm. She hoped he wouldn't spit it out in front of her. That always made her sick.
At two thirty after a back rubdown and many complaints on her part such as the fact that she would like to get up out of bed for something other than going to the bathroom; she was no invalid, didn't they realize she was just crazy? The day nurse came in with her false teeth showing in an equally false smile and told her Doctor McBride was on his way to see her, wasn't that nice?
Doctor McBride loomed in the doorway six and a half feet tall and very young and very black. "Good afternoon, Miss Sheridon."
"Uhhh," she said. "I didn't know you were ... uhhh. I thought you were probably a Scotsman."
He grinned and turned his very straight and very Caucasian profile to her. "My ancestor had the name, McBride. A female anccster took the name because all her babies were by him."
"WELL, don't take it out on me," she said, recovering herself and telling herself she wasn't prejudiced even if the Mormon Church wouldn't let them be an elder. After all, she was through with all of that stuff, wasn't she? But at least somebody could have told her!
They talked. She did most of the talking, resenting him because she didn't want to talk at all but couldn't help herself. She also complained because she kept hearing the voices and she had no medicine.
"I'd like to see if we can't keep you off medicine for a while," he said pleasantly.
"Well, shit. That's just great. How are you going to like it when I change personalities? There's somebody else called Suzanne who takes me over when I get really bad. Do you honestly think I'll be able to answer questions put to Honey Sheridon when there is no Honey Sheridon around anywhere?"
McBride laughed. "I've never seen a real textbook schizophrenic case. I think it will be very interesting."
"Screw you and all the seven dwarfs, too. I don't like to not have any knowledge at all of what's happening to me."
"Then perhaps you'll learn to prevent this other personality coming in and taking over your body."
"You think I want it to happen? You think I actually have some control over it? My God, have you got a degree?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I've got a degree. M.D., Psychology and Psychiatry." "You don't look old enough."
"Us nigger boys keeps our age good, Miss Sheridon, please, ma'am."
"Oh, you!" she said, her face scarlet.
He dropped the Uncle Tom dialect and smiled at her. "I'd like to help you. I'd like to help you very much. I'm going to try, but it'll be my way. No medication for a while. Give it another day."
"I'll..." She stopped, realizing she was about to say she would be stark raving mad in another day, but she didn't want to go that route again. She swallowed. What she swallowed tasted very bitter. "I'll try," she finally said.
Three months later she had progressed to the point where she no longer had private sessions. She had graduated to group therapy. In the beginning she was horrified. "You honestly mean you want me to go in there with all those people and admit that I've loved my brother, that I've screwed him, that I'm in love with him, had that abortion, tried to kill myself twice, all that stuff you honestly think I'm going to talk about it in front of other people?"
"Exactly."
"But I can't do that. Think of the moving picture industry. Supposing I do get well and go back to Hollywood and make pictures again. You think I'd want people going to see my pictures and sit there and look up at me on the screen and tell their friends they know all that rotten stuff about me?"
"Your brother sent your wigs. With glasses on nobody'll recognize you, Honey. In group therapy we'll call you something else. You pick out the name."
"That's mighty white of you."
He laughed.
She blushed and hoped he didn't notice the wild beating of her heart.
"How about Loretta?"
"All right." He patted her shoulder and left the room. She put her hand up to the place where his hand had touched her and wished she could kiss it. Her mind dipped and swirled. What would people think if they knew she was in love with a Negro psychologist? Plenty, that was what. Especially Mike. And the rest of the brothers and her sister Gwennie. And Aunt Laura. She'd have a fit and come on strong with the bit about the different birds not mating and all that rot. Well, too bad. She'd have to pay her money and take her chances. It wouldn't be easy. Even Doctor McBride would give her some resistance. He was so calm and so disinterested. There were times when she hated him. No man had ever looked at her before as if she were nothing but... a ... patient. Some thing to work on. Well, she'd break down all his foolish barriers. She stewed and fretted and wondered what his first name was, too embarassed to ask him, too afraid to ask one of the nurses, for fear somebody would catch on. She was better. At first, it had been terrible. He'd finally relented and let her have sleeping pills so she could sleep without the threat of voices banging away at her all night long. But then he'd told her she'd had nothing but placebos for three weeks and had been sleeping like a top. After she'd finished having her little tantrum over being fooled with a bunch of sugar pills, she'd begun to fall in love with him and really want to get well, so she'd cooperated to the best of her ability.
Now she told herself that she would have to wait until she had been dismissed before she could spring anything on him. Not only did the hospital have a rule against patients socializing with doctors but he was far too ethical for her taste. A queezy thought rammed its ugly head into her thoughts. Was he married?
Four months more and she knew his name was George and that he was not married. She thought George was a very unromantic name, but she didn't tell him so. Sometimes she wondered if he were a homosexual. The motion made her push the panic button. But he didn't seem to notice that she was young and beautiful and made for him. All day long she worked on her hospital therapy tasks, wondering what it would be like to screw him. Were Negro men really hung better than white men, or was that just another one of those old wive's tales-old Southern White tales, actually, because of the sex-fear syndrome. She hoped he was. He ought to be pretty big. She looked at the size of him and thought about it and found her cunt growing hot with moisture. It had been seven months since she'd had a prick in her cunt and she was constantly obsessed with thoughts of just how it would be between them. Seven months? She stopped and thought. No. More than that. Seven months in the hospital and three months with Mildred, that made ten months. Of course, with Mildred she'd had the dildo, but that wasn't really the same.
One day in group therapy she looked down at Doctor McBride's shoes and they looked enormous. She remembered somebody saying to her that you could tell the size of a man's prick by looking at his feet and could hardly contain herself for the excitement those big feet of his aroused in her.
His voice cut through her fantasy. "And what's on your mind today, Loretta?"
"I was thinking about ..." Oh, Jesus Christ! She couldn't tell him that! Not in group! "I was thinking about how hot it would be in the West Coast this time of the year and wishing to go back," she amended.
"You aren't supposed to think over your answer," he reprimanded her. "You know very well that you're supposed to blurt out your thoughts when you're asked to express them. No more editing!"
Cornered, trapped, held down, pinned down, shot down-but not screwed. "Okay. I'll try to do better in the future, Doctor McBride."
Two weeks later Doctor McBride came into her room and asked her if she'd like to have a pass. "Your sister is here. She'd like to take you for the weekend."
She looked at him blankly. "You mean go to Iowa from New York for the weekend?"
"No. She's here in New York for the weekend. She came especially for a visit with you. I think you're well enough to go out on a pass."
"You mean she came all the way to New York just to see me? What about her husband and kid?"
"You're her sister. She loves you."
"I'll be damned. We've never been very close, you know. There was just Mike I was ... close ... Gwendolyn and I were never ... I'll be damned! All right. If you think it's okay."
"It's the beginning. It'll take you a little while to adjust to living outside the hospital after so many months. If this works out all right we'll try another pass soon, for a few more days."
"Yes." She looked at the open doorway, wondering if anybody was in the hall. It was her chance to talk to him in private, except that the door was open. "Doctor McBride, would you mind closing the door? I have something to say to you that I don't want anybody else to hear."
He closed it, looking at her, at least it appeared, warily.
She gulped, afraid to start, but knowing she must. "Listen, I don't want to see my sister. Oh, well, I'll see her. I mean, I wouldn't want her to have come all this distance and then be disappointed ... unless she's just here out of a sense of duty. But there's something else I'd much rather do since I'm allowed to have a pass."
"What's that, Honey?"
She looked at his handsome black face, at his concerned-but aloof-eyes and had to look away. "Surely you know how I feel about you. I'd ... well, I'd like to see you on the outside. Alone." There. It was out. But she still couldn't bring herself to look at him.
His voice was very soft. She had expected him to say something like it would never do. To bring up the opposition of the difference in their races. But he didn't.
He said, "Honey, it's a very natural thing for you to form an attachment, for your therapist. Almost all women patients go through a phase of thinking they like to marry their psychologist."
"That doesn't apply to me."
"Yes, it does."
"No, it doesn't!" She looked at him then and saw nothing but that same look of concern in his eyes. That carefully composed professional expression in his face. "I love you, Doc-George." She took the three steps that separated them and reached up for him, expecting kim to take her into his arms. Instead he held her away from him, looking down on her as if she were a child, holding her by her shoulders.
"It's true that I don' know exactly what's in your mind. I can only guess. But it's also true that all women ... or almost all women go through a phase of thinking they're in love with their therapist. It's a very good sign, Honey. And in your case I think you're behaving in a typical pattern. But... if you aren't, then I'm sorry. I'm engaged to be married. I'm leaving Roselawn within a month. I've already given my notice."
She jerked out of his grip. "You can't! You can't be going to get married!"
"But I am." He crossed his arms at his waist. "Who to?" she asked blankly. "Is it a white girl?" "No. She's a black girl, as a matter of fact." "But I... " He smiled gently and in an equally gentle voice he said, "But you. You think I should throw everything away because you're a white girl. Well, you aren't the first white girl who has told me what you've told me."
"You mean you've dated white girls?"
"Of course. A lot of people don't recognize a color bar. And the girl I'm marrying ... I'm marrying the 'girl.' Not her color. If she had a white skin I'd still want to marry her. But most of the people who've wanted to marry me have been patients. They get over it. So will you, Honey."
She flung herself face down on the bed. "I won't, I won't, I wont!" She kicked her legs and hammered with her fists on the bed. He left the room.
In the doctor's lounge McBride lit a cigarette and sighed.
"What's the matter, George?" asked Doctor Filmore.
"Scene."
"I bet I can guess. The primadonna. She told you she was hot for your big black body."
"How'd you guess?" McBride was sarcastic.
"About time she came out with it. Now maybe she can go on with the therapy. What did you do, tell her the same old 'engaged to marry' business?"
"Yes. Jesus. Just when I was getting through to three women in her group. Listen, I'm going to ask to have those other girls transferred to my group when you take over the one with Honey Sheridon. I don't want to lose contact with those other three girls. They're making wonderful progress and just because one out of the group falls into the pattern I don't see why I should have to put the added strain on those other gals to put them with a new therapist."
"I know what you mean, old buddy. I don't see why it can't be worked out."
"Someday I'm really going to really find a girl and get married," said McBride. "That'd take off some of the pressure."
"Oh, yeah, baby," said Doctor Filmore. "Sure, sure, Take it from me, man. I've been married seventeen years and if I got a divorce every time some patient asked me to I'd be divorced more times than anybody in the United States."
Honey had been in Roselawn a year and a month when she was released. Mike didn't come to see her and check her out of the hospital. Instead, her Aunt Laura came and flew all the way back to Hollywood with her. When she asked about Mike. Aunt Laura told her he was in Europe. Her studio decided to take one more chance with her. They gave her the lead in a biblical production. She was great. On the last day of her shooting schedule she said goodbye to her co-workers and said she was going to go home and sleep for a week. Her maid found her the next morning, pale from loss of blood and half dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. Seventeen days later she was off the critical list. Hollywood couldn't keep her attempted suicide from the press.
Chapter Nine
I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT ANYMORE, Mike." she said to him. Shut up, will you, about that? You've hassled me all afternoon about it."
"I'm afraid you'll do it again, Honey, and the next time somebody might not find you in time." "So what? What have I got to live for?" "Me."
She flounced around on the bed in the Chicago motel room, feeling oddly, yet distinctly that they had gone through this scene before. It was something that happened to a lot of people a lot of times. The various and assorted psychologists and psychiatrists had told her, but she still didn't believe them.
"Mike, did we ever talk about that before? In a place that looked this? And say the same words, I mean, you know, all the whole ball of wax. About the Roselawn place and the time afterwards and all, with my slacks on the floor all rolled up in a ball and your tie hanging over the knob of the dresser drawer?"
"I don't think so. Getting hungry?"
"No. Answer me."
"I did. I said I didn't think so."
"But it seems like we've played this whole thing out before. All the way."
"Well, maybe we have! God knows I was worried to death about you when the flash came over the television that you were not expected to live."
She smiled into his ribs. "But you came, didn't you?"
"Yes, Honey. I came. I always come. I'm afraid not to."
He sounded tired and she was glad. He had worn her out asking her go over all that mess when she had tried to kill the twins and then the Roselawn year and after that the attempt to kill herself.
She said, "Is it only because you're afraid not to come to me that you do? Don't you like to screw me anymore?"
"Of course I like to screw you, for Christ's sweet sake. I do, don't I?"
"Well, yes. But how do I know for sure that you really want to?"
"Don't act like a moron, Honey. You know very well that a man can't unless he wants to."
She laughed, running her hands up and down his ribs. "A woman has got it all over a man in that respect, hasn't she? If she doesn't want it, she can lie there and eat a hamburger and sing Yankee Doodle, can't she?"
"Yeah. But it wouldn't be very conducive."
"I suppose not. Mike, screw me again."
Tm tired."
"So am I. But I still want to be screwed. I don't know when you're going to go home again and leave me all by myself with an empty cunt."
"I'm hungry. Let's eat first."
"I think you're getting old. How old are you? Let's see. You're three years older than I am and I'm twenty-seven so that makes you thirty. Yes. That's it. The sex drive begins to decline in the male of the species when he's in his early thirties."
"Goddamn it, Honey, I'm not getting old. I was working on a play, I haven't slept well in ages, I spent a lot of time on a plane, I slept a while before you arrived and we've been screwing or talking ever since. I've got to have some energy to go on."
"Eat my cunt."
"Honey, damnit..."
She laughed. "It's all clean. I just got out of the bathtub, didn't I?"
He sighed and got to his knees at the edge of the bed. Then he pulled her across it and opened her legs, digging his face down into her soft warm cunt and beginning to encircle her lemony clitoris with his tongue.
"Ah, yes! Yes! That's it, Mike."
Slowly, gently, sweetly, he continued to massage her and tongue her, feeling his cock begin to grow big and bigger, the lemon and honey scent of her pussy stimulating him as much as the warmth of her flesh under his searching fingers. When she was vibrating and whispering in soft moans, he stopped and opened her legs wider, gazing down at her dripping cunt before he pushed her legs back so that her knees rested on both sides of her head. His cock flamed bursting, hungry for release. He inserted it in a hard jabbing thrust, pushing her legs flat against the bed with his hands. She slowly began to push her hips up and down as she matched his rhythm, squealing with delight. He panted, pommeling in and out of her, sawing and grinding, a tight band around his chest increasing in pressure and cutting off his breath. He stopped for a second and caught his breath while she waited gladly beneath him, unaware that anything was wrong. He continued to pile-drive in and out and the pain increased sharply for a second and he cried out hoarsely. But the sharp-edged pain left him as suddenly as it had begun and she was still unaware that his sounds were anything but the sounds of passion. He felt the harsh trembling of her body as she climaxed. He drove his cock home deeper than he had ever been before as his own juice spasmed outwards in a hot thick gush. He lay on her, panting, for a long time before he was able to find the strength to pull out of her and fall weakly to the bed. In the beginning, she had fainted when she reached orgasm, but in later years she no longer did, so she was aware for the first time that something was wrong with him. She listened in fright to his laboured breathing for a second before she raised up on her elbow to look at his face and found it strangely gray and strained.
"Oh, my God! I've killed him. I've screwed him to death." She said it out loud as she put a hand on his chest and felt the reassuring thumping of his heart.
"No, you didn't," he grinned. "I think it was just indigestion or something. I'm okay."
But he looked tired and beat and she remained alarmed. After a while she offered to go out and get them something to eat and bring it back to the room, but he said he was feeling better and the color was back in his face so she didn't protest. She had no idea that he was wanting to get out of the room because he was afraid she would demand more and for the first time in her life she knew a pang of real guilt.
After they had eaten dinner she told him she had to go back to Hollywood.
He stared at her. "This is a new wrinkle. You're always raving and ranting when I leave. You've never been the one to leave first."
"I know it. Maybe we all have to change gears once in a while. Or at least, once. But to tell you the truth, I'm a little anxious to get hack because of a new part. I want it. Have you read Jeremy Kate?"
"No. Just the reviews. But isn't that a man's lead?"
"Yes. It's just the supporting role. But I'll have a chance to really act. Except for the role I did as Rahab, you know, the biblical epic, I haven't had a chance to do a lot of acting. It was all face and figure and music and extravagant set. Oh, don't look at me like that. I can be honest with myself, Mike."
The strange part of it all was that she was telling him the truth about the part and about her desire for the chance to play the role. But underneath was another thing, a frightening, rocking, jarring, jolting thing that she wouldn't quite allow herself to face. Mike had never been sick in his life. She had never heard his admitting to so much as a headache. Something had happened when she had seen his face so gray and strained. He looked older. Older than she had realized he was, although she knew thirty was not old, not the way it is to someone who is thirteen. But more than that, she realized for the first time in her life that he was made of flesh and bone, just as she was, just as other people were, when all the time she had thought he was... she couldn't quite find a word for the thing she had thought he was.
His plane wouldn't leave until midnight, so she suggested they see a movie.
The next day he was able to say to Donna for the first time in something resembling honesty that he though: Honey was going to be all right.
He didn't work on the play that day. Instead he slept, exhausted. Donna fixed all the things he especially loved for dinner and was patiently sweet to him, deliberately refraining from allowing her bitterness about Honey to come to the surface. He knew what she was doing but he couldn't blame her for it. She wanted him to make love to her. He didn't know whether she ever suspected the truth about Honey and himself; but if she did, she was doing a good job of keeping it hidden and he appreciated her motives, conscious or unconscious.
After his day of rest, he was able to make love to her satisfactorily and although he thought once of the pain in his chest that had grabbed him when he was screwing Honey the night before, he shoved it into the back of his mind, intending to take it out and examine it again when he had more time.
But then the twins got sick and he knew the anxiety of being reduced to a fumbling father as he watched them through the long nights in an oxygen tent. Little girls not quite four years old, he thought as he looked at them in the quiet of the hospital night, should not have to be that sick.
Donna stayed with them days and he stayed with them nights and he realized sickly that he had missed a lot now that he was in danger of losing them. A love he didn't know he had for them welled up inside of him as he watched them grow weaker and sicker, refusing for some reason unknown to medical science to respond to all the antibiotics. At three o'clock on a nightmare morning he rang for the nurse. He thought Leslie, the biggest of the two and the most solemn, had stopped breathing. In a tangled web of hissing oxygen, needles dripping glucose and the eternal death-smelling hospital horror, he felt the tears running down his cheeks as he stood by. Stood there knowing the helplessness, the hopelessness, of a layman in the world of medicine. It seemed to him that five hours had dripped slowly away. It had been less than five minutes. The nurse smiled at him and said crisply. "She's better. It was just the oxygen tank that shut off. It needed to be replaced." Her wise brown eyes looked into the other crib. "Look. The other one has her eyes open. Liza, your daddy's here."
It seemed to him that he had witnessed a miracle. He tried to tell Donna how he felt when he went home to awaken her and tell her that at last the girls had responded to the medication. But he was unable to tell her anything. He looked at her and he thought of Honey and he went to bed and slept the day away, awakening in pain at dinnertime. But it went away and he forgot it again because that was the way he was. Pain was alien to his nature and when it wasn't happening to him he didn't remember it, didn't write down a note to himself telling himself to go for a check-up. Instead he started working on another play.
At Christmas he went to Iowa with Donna and the twins. They played in the clean country Iowa snow and went to church with the family. He looked around at his brothers and their wives and his sister and her husband, each with at least two children, some of them with four and wondered what was wrong with Honey and himself that they couldn't accept the reality of society.
Honey. He hadn't really thought of Honey Lou until they had talked about her.
Talked about her and avoided saying anything important about their crazy sister because there were always children present and Aunt Laura didn't like to hear about it anyway. Their conversation about Honey was simply that it was too bad she couldn't see fit to visit her family at least once a year.
"Of course, she was busy." "Of course, she was successful."
And then Gwendolyn said, "I don't suppose anybody knows anything about it but me, but I might as well tell you. She's married again."
"Who did she marry this time?" asked Aunt Laura, disapproving of whoever it was.
"A costume designer. Martin Washington."
"Washington?" asked Aunt Laura. "Why ..." Her eyes fluttered around the room, taking in her own children and her sister's children and all her assorted grandchildren and great nieces and nephews. "He's not... Honey didn't... I mean, Washington? isn't that a . .. ?"
Aunt Laura's eyes continued to flutter.
Gwendolyn nodded, putting her hands over her pregnant belly in a protective gesture, as if she would shield this new child from the blow of its aunt marrying a Negro.
"Well, the thing of it is," said Aunt Laura, "we've simply got to keep it away from the ... I mean, I hope it doesn't get out around the neighborhood, merciful God, what..."
She stopped, feeling herself pierced on the end of a vicious gaze from an eleven-year-old granddaughter. "Well, that's ... uh, real nice that Honey ... I certainly do hope she ... yes, I certainly do hope she can find ... whatever she's looking for," she said finally.
Two months later, Mike read on the front page of the Times that Honey Sheridon, lovely young actress who had recently been nominated for the Academy Award for her supporting role in Jeremy Kate, had gotten a Mexican divorce from her fourth husband, Martin Washington, a Hollywood costume designer. "Asked if there was anything to the rumors concerning her romance with Atherton Ellis, the playwright, having anything to do with the split, Miss Sheridon said she had no comment other than, 'Mr. Ellis is no more than a friend.' " Mike read it and read on, stuffing a ham sandwich into his mouth and tasting bitter green gall instead of ham. "Miss Sheridon was married to Kelly Carlisle and was divorced in 1962. After that the actress married Tony Freemont, the singer, which ended in divorce in 1963. Ed Fortune, the composer, and Miss Sheridon were married in 1964, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1966. Mr. Washington and the star had been married two months."
A week later while he was watching the news with his daughters, Honey's picture was flashed on the screen with Atherton Ellis, the playwright. They were vacationing at Colorado Springs. Together.
During the night Mike rolled over on his side and came screamingly awake with the clutching grip of pain in his chest. He lay there sweating, afraid to breath, while the pain clawed at him with twenty-one nails in each hand. "Donna. Donna." His voice was weak and torn out of his chest with effort. "Wake up, Donna, something's wrong with me."
Chapter Ten
HONEY SAT ACROSS FROM J. W. WESTBROOK. SHE crossed and uncrossed her legs. She sighed and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke carelessly into his 'no smoking' face. There were no ashtrays in his office. She held the match in her hand looking at it with mock concern. And all the time he was talking, talking.
She leaned forward. "Mr. Westbrook. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but where shall I put this match?"
"Eat it for all I care. Shove it up your ass. You haven't been paying a damned bit of attention to what I've been saying, have you? Not one goddamn lousy word!" His face was the color of a cheap grade of burgundy wine.
"Of course, Mr. Westbrook. You said, boiled down and slightly refined, that I have put the studio on the spot. That I can hardly play the part of a spotless Atherton isn't going to go meekly off to Mexico, Las Vegas or Reno and get with Atherton Ellis, to say nothing of the fact that he has to get a divorce. You also said that Atherton's wife is a personal friend of yours. You didn't say 'how' personal and I didn't ask you. But you did go on to say that Mrs. Atherton isn't going to go meekly off to Mexico, Las Vegas or Reno and get a divorce. You spoke loud and long about the institution of marriage; the fact that Atherton and the Estelle have been married for twenty-nine years and have in an empty brass pencil holder. Standing up, she said crisply, "I suggest but a goddamn bitch, Mr. Westbrook. Aside from that, all you did was repeat yourself." All this Honey said in a sweet voice with her face calm and lovely. She reached over onto his shiny desk and crushed out her cigarette in an empty brass pencil holder. Standing up, she said crisply, "I suggest you get somebody to replace me in the part. Anybody could play Regina. I understand that you need somebody who is not only a good actress, but somebody who is pure in heart. No hard feelings, Mr. Westbrook."
"Now wait just a goddamn minute, here, now! You sit down there. Goddamn it, Honey, we've got too much money already sunk into that film. Think of all the publicity. Think of all those stills. Think of seven damn scenes that cost us five hundred thousand dollars to make. Think of..."
"You think of it, Mr. Westbrook," she said, turning and leaving the office. "It seems to give you a lot of pleasure."
He sat and listened to the staccato tap tap tap of her pumps as she hurried through the halls. He picked up the telephone and told his secretary to keep her in the outer office. He heard Honey's rich voice saying blithly to his secretary, "And screw you, too," as she walked on out of the office.
Westbrook sat utterly still for a few seconds, picking at some loose skin on his lower lip. Holding a transparent piece of dried skin in his hand and looking at it thoughtfully, he rolled it between his thumb and index finger and let it drop to the floor. Then he picked up the telephone and told his secretary to get Estelle Ellis. His eyes were the color of saliva as he waited for Estelle to answer.
Honey was ready when Atherton rang her doorbell. She went to the door carrying her sable coat. "You're late."
His face was bleak. "Couldn't be helped. Let me help you on with your coat. My, you smell delightful. I like that scent. I've been intending to ask you what it is."
"Something I have made for me. It's called lemon blossom. When I was a kid I used to love the smell of lemons and I'd eat the rind just to get the scent of them in my mouth. A friend put me in touch with this house that makes personal cosmetics and perfumes for people so I had mine done. I'm glad you Ike it. What's wrong, Atherton?"
He pushed the down button on the elevator and turned to look down on her flowerlike face. "Estelle," he said bitterly. "The bitch. She's changed her mind about the divorce."
"Oh, no." She looked at the buttons on the elevator, aware of the going down sensation and the tiny fear in the pit of her stomach that always belted her when she was going down, that unvoiced fear of cables breaking and the sickening rush to the ground twenty floors below. "Why did she change her mind?"
"Wouldn't say." He shook his head and took her arm as the elevator came to an expensive stop, looking down on the smooth beauty of her hair.
"I'll bet I know. I was called in to see Westbrook today. He gave me the business. Bell, book, candle, verse and chapter. Image! Regina! Public, girl next door, shattering, box office, half a million dollars and all the rest of the sublime shit that directors hand out to people who threaten to screw them up. Then he mentioned something about being a friend to Estelle. Well. So now what?"
'I don't know," he said. Helping her into his Lincoln, he looked up into the dung colored sky and coughed. He took her hand in his as he told the chauffeur the address. Apologetically, he said, "The truth of the matter is, she's got everything I owe tied up. The property, the stock, the bonds . . . everything."
"How silly," said Honey. "Why did you allow such a foolish thing to happen?"
"Don't you remember the paternity suit against me four or five years ago?"
"Yes, but that was four or five years ago. It settled out of court, didn't it?"
"Yes, to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars. The child was mine, you know."
She looked up at him, a stab of fear grinding into her bowels. From the side he looked old-old-old. His neck was wrinkled and fell into folds down over his collar. His eyes were deeply set in their sockets, with the laugh lines along the sides of his face deeply etched. His mouth drooped. The hand that held hers was the hand of an old man. And yet... he was so much like Mike. Not that he looked anything like Mike. He was thirty years older, for one thing. And his flab was contained in a corset that had horrified her and yet made her want to shriek with laughter when she had first seen it. Mike had no flab on his body. His legs were the legs of a young man. His arms were firm, the flesh warm and solid as he held her. His prick was ... a young prick, full of the fires of youth.
But Atherton made love to her in the same way. When she closed her eyes, she could forget that his prick was the prick of an old man with the feeble drive of the elderly. . Because Atherton seemed to have an enduring ability to screw. He screwed her in the same way that Mike did. All the way inside of her, deeply, completely. He possessed her. She needed to be possessed. She also knew she wouldn't allow very many men to possess her and that quality in her had been the trigger that pulled the cork that shot the load that demolished the house that all her other marriages had built. Atherton, she told herself, was different. Never mind that little voice squirming around down there in her kidneys. Never mind that string of despair that whispered in a silent scream, That was what you said about the rest of them. This time she would make it work. This time it would be for keeps. To hell with Estelle.
We don't need your money, Atherton. I've got plenty of it. I've never been extravagent like so many people in the movie industry. I pay my bills and save my money. I've got an accountant who takes care of every dime I make. He invests it and gives me an allowance. The allowance is more than I need."
"Your Mormon upbringing," he said lightly. "But darling, I can't imagine being married to a woman who has all the money."
"I fail to see your point. What difference would it make? And anyway, Estelle has it all now."
"It would make a hell of a lot of difference. I made the money Estelle has control of."
"So what? You can make more, can't you? Why, one play a year ... with your name and reputation."
His jaw knotted in anger. "I'll not let her get away with it. That money is mine. I made it. I intended to give her a good settlement. God knows she's been my wife for a long time. Twenty-nine years. She's the mother of my children and I had no intentions of setting her out on her own on the street in abject poverty. But if she thinks she's going to screw me out of my last cent, she's badly mistaken."
"You could play it cool," pointed out Honey, "by pretending to go along with her. I could go back to making the picture, play the part of Regina of Renaldo; let her think she's won. She and Westbrook, that is. It wouldn't kill us, you know, to live apart for a few months."
His hands squeezed hers. "Maybe it wouldn't kill you, but it would me. I don't like that back street romance scene. I want to be with you every day. I want to wake up in the morning with you beside me in the bed. I want to be able to reach out and gather you into my arms when I awaken during the night. Besides, I'm fifty-nine years old. A lot of my friends have suffered heart attacks, died of cancer. I'm sure I deserve a little while with you, Honey." His voice broke and she was shaken with empathy for him. He underlined his statement, "Time has a way of running out, you know."
"Don't say those things, Atherton. You aren't going to die."
The driver stopped in front of a mansion, hesitating. Fifty cars were already parked in the giant circular drive. Atherton leaned forward, "That's all right, Rick. We'll walk from here." As the driver opened the door, Honey smelled the scent of the old man that Atherton was as he moved forward in the seat, the creaky old-man smell that cannot be disguised even with steam baths and a regular masseuse. She pushed the revolting thought from her mind and tried not to notice the slow way he moved as he got out of the back seat. Rick Rivers smiled as he held the door and wiggled his eyebrows at her. She swore at him under her breath. He had no right to know what she was thinking. She had no right to think it, for that matter. She must not allow herself to get carried away with the outside housing of the man she was sure, she kept telling herself, that she loved. After all, it was his mind that she loved.
And inside her head she could hear Mike's sardonic voice asking her if she screwed Atherton's mind. So she answered Mike just as silently and just as sarcastically by saying that part of what she screwed was his mind; but even if he didn't have a head to think with he would be a good piece of ass. That was something she didn't have to he to herself about, she thought smugly. Frantically.
Inside was the clink of glasses, the polite laughter, the modulated pleasantness of background music and the fragrance of expensive perfume mixed with the scent of money. Honey tensed. "Are you sure they'll accept me?" She was thinking of his twenty-nine years with Estelle. Of Atherton walking into this same beautiful home with Estelle. According to him and to the gossip of Hollywood, Atherton had never once stepped off the straight and narrow except with a starlet who brought a paternity suit against him-and now Honey Sheridon.
"Of course they'll accept you. These people are not as narrow in their concepts as... a lot of people."
Not members of his rather extravagant church. Not members of the social life Estelle and Atherton were immersed in. Broadminded people. Artists and writers and archeologists who never a color line did draw; who tended to look at people as people and not as backgrounds, bank accounts, automobiles and where they stood in the great unclassified caste system that was denied but nevertheless there in the United States of America.
"Gladys married a man twenty-five years her junior, you know, after Edgar passed on."
She wondered as she was taken around and introduced, how Gladys could possible have married a man twenty-five years younger. What did she do about personal things like covering the old flab of her belly that no longer stayed in unless it was encased in a girdle?
"How do you do? So nice to meet you."
And what about the false teeth? She knew they were false. What did Gladys do at night? Leave them in her mouth, of course, but what if he happened in on her, this young artist, when her teeth were out and her mouth was all drawn in on her shrunken old gums?
"Oh, yes. I'm so happy to know you."
And did she worry about such things as that gray showing at her scalp line when she was vulnerable and asleep in bed? Did Gladys awaken and look at her old face in the mirror, old despite four face lifts, and did she look at that little tell-tale eighth of an inch at her scalp where the auburn wasn't and the gray was and wonder if the kid who was her husband noticed it?
"Yes, it's a lovely home. Where is Gladys?"
"She went upstairs. One of the girls spilled a drink on her dress so she's changing into something of Gladys."
Gladys came doWn resplendent in a hyacinth blue gown, her face a tight mask from the latest lift, her figure encased in the iron of a torturous slenderizer. "Darling!"
Elegant perfume. Laquered nails on old fingers that clutched at her youth and continued to rub the skin of her arm as if she would rub some of it off onto Honey. Gorgeous wig of auburn by Clairol, softly curled around her face, managing to look thirty-five by the magic of cosmetics and the sweating agony of reducing salons. Why don't they make it possible to ... or do they ever do plastic surgery on hands? The hands tell, my dear, and so does the scrawny old neck of the hordes of youth-crazed madness multiplied by the menopause. .. men and women alike. Oh, no. Don't SAY THOSE THINGS, EVEN TO YOURSELF. Look at how sensitive Atherton is, if he ever so much as had an inkling that you thought. ..
"My dear," said Gladys with honest concern, "you look ill. Are you not feeling well?"
"Oh, yes, 1 feel fine." The touch of her old claw on Honey's forehead. "Atherton!" Calling over her shoulder to Atherton who was swallowed up in a group of women admirers. "Come and take care of this sweet young thing!"
Concern plain on his face, leading her upstairs to the quiet of a blue bedroom, dim and pleasant and quiet. "I'll be all right. I'll just lie down for a while."
"You're sure? I'd much rather stay with you." "No, no. I'm fine, really. I mean, almost. Maybe it was just too much to drink, too quickly. I was thirsty, you know, and those cocktails are strong. And I'd rather be by myself, Atherton, please."
Door closing, closing her in to the quiet room where she searched in her purse for a pill, good God, hadn't she brought the pillbox after all the times she had been caught without them? There was the room changing from blue to gold to pink to amber to purple, a room with garish hell of people's voices, people's mouths, people's lip-smacking finger-licking mouths that were wiped with napkins after a meal and a Kleenex after sucking somebody's cock. , Shrieking mouths that laughed with cruel laughter, the sound like a barbed wire fence digging out little holes as the barbs went in.
Who was that guy I was married to last? Washington. Oh, yes. And the family! Yee gods, the family, you didn't really, yes I did, with a tornado on the tongue of Aunt Laura who sat by an Iowa telephone saying, "I hope you're happy, of course, you realize that half of our friends are no longer speaking to us."
"What was so wrong about marrying a black man?"
"Wrong?" Coming through the telephone and banging her in the eyeballs, purple fury in her proper Aunt Laura-ish choking gasps.
"The only wrong I did him was in not marrying him because I loved him, Aunt Laura. I don't love. I love somebody else but he's a nice guy and I'll try." Actually, she had forgotten that Washington was black. And she tried to make her Aunt Laura understand that but, Aunt Laura was not ready, would never be ready to understand such a statement, well, for God's sake, Honey, you can see, can't you, and on and on, and on.
His black flesh covering her body, oh, yes, sometimes she could remember he was black. Well, not really black. Brown. Clean and warm and brown and good. "Honey, I can't help you. Let's get a divorce."
No. He hadn't helped her. And where in the hell was the pillbox, she would start screaming any minute, running through the house tearing pictures down and banging people over the heads with the pictures, all ancestors ... well, ancestors of somebody, sea gulls and fuzzy wiggly worms in bright yellow inch long fur coats, all of them eating and drinking too much, standing around in knots of three to five, grinning all the while. There they were. God. Cool metal box, where was the catch? Chipping a honey-beige fingernail getting it open, reaching in with the same chipped fingernail that was detached from her arm, her hand, floating all by itself as if it had a mind to think with, to reach inside the pillbox and pop the sanity pill into her mouth. Oh, yes.
Slowly the room came back into focus, cool blue, with old and dignified furniture that no longer looked at her out of obscene eyes. Oh, yes.
As sanity returned she heard snatches of conversation. "Honey, just remember, when you feel yourself slipping away, take one of these."
And, "Honey, we've got to start from the 'now' and forget the past."
Well, that was what she was doing, wasn't it? Wasn't she? So Estelle was a bitch anyway, and Atherton loved Honey. Didn't Estelle owe it to him to make him happy. No, she didn't owe him anything. Well, he was like Mike and Mike was locked up in a world of his own, a play a year, a wife in the suburbs and two twin daughters with rosy cheeks.
And God, I want to be a good girl from now on. Please, God, forgive me for my sins. I want to walk in the path of righteousness like it says in the 23rd psalm. No, you don't. If you did, you'd tell Atherton to stay with his Estelle. You don't love him. You're lying, lying, lying, Honey Lou Sheridon. Gritting her teeth.
Yes. That's what I'll do. I'll tell him tonight when we go home. Tell him I can't do it. Somehow I'll find a way to tell him without hurting his ego too much. He's a nice man. A good man, really.
She went into the connecting bathroom and patted cool water on her face and then down the long stairway to the rooms where one of Gladys' 'little dinners' for sixty people or so was about to start.
Her legs were weak so she went into what she thought was a downstairs powder room and surprised a man and woman in the act of cunnilingus.
"I'm sorry," said the woman from the bed. Grinning. "But Tom is otherwise engaged." Legs spread wide apart enjoying the red of Tom's (whoever he was) tongue.
"Oh," said Honey. "I don't care for any right now." Or black-eyed peas, pheasant or hummingbird's tongue. Giggling, she turned and bumped into a familiar looking woman and caught herself before she actually said, in recognition, "Mildred!"
"You must be Honey Sheridon," said Mildred, eyeing her suspiciously. "I used to know somebody who looks enough like you to be your double." Honey stuck out a hand full of bones that were cold as ice with remembered whipped-cream-in-the-cunt and she knew she had never fooled the Lesbian for one minute.
"Oh, really?" she said, trembling. "How strange."
Mildred's eyes glittered and then she turned her back and went down the hall where she put her arms possessively around a teen-aged girl with long black hair and black-ringed eyes, looking over her shoulder at Honey with her eyes dripping maliciously.
The dinner was gotten through with pleasant and unpleasant talk of Reagan, Nixon, the John Birch Society, Bobby Kennedy, Rockefeller and Humphrey. Viet Nam, Korea, World War II, World War I, Civil Rights, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, and for some strange reason, Margaret Sanger and Amelia Earhart.
Aterton came and took her from a group of old young-people. "I'm afraid I'll have to take this gorgeous creature from all you unlucky admirers. Honey and I are leaving for Mexico on the 7:00 AM. plane."
Clasping a hand to her mouth, she looked at him with bright hurricane-swept eyes. "Oh, my God. I'd forgotten all about that."
A look of pain shadowed his features but he quickly covered it and smiled at her, holding her fur for her to shrug into.
In the Lincoln she said, "But a Mexican divorce isn't legal. Not really. At least not in California."
He looked at her oddly. "We weren't going for a divorce. Honey, did you drink too much? We talked about the divorce earlier this evening. I told you I would see to it that Estelle listened to reason. We're going down for the bullfights."
"Oh, yes. How stupid of me."
At her door she turned and lifted her face for a kiss.
He said, "You look like a flower looking up at me like that. I think I'll stay all night."
She said nothing.
Chapter Eleven
HE UNDRESSED HER AS IE SHE WERE A CHILD, tenderly, kissing her breasts, her thighs, her flat belly, the softness of the flesh between her legs, his hungry mouth flat against the golden honey-colored hairs as he worked down, touching her clitoris with an eager lapping- And all the while she stared woodenly at the ceiling and wondered how she could get rid of him. She had to get rid of him. That was all there was to it. She had to call Mike. The pills were not working. She was supposed to take one every twelve hours and already she had taken three of them in less than six hours. But even so, it had not been enough to keep the madness from coming .down over her with a blood-red curtain. Inside the curtain were all those people calling her name. Her mother. Her father. The dead baby. All of the people alive and dead coming out of her past at her, screaming and taunting and speaking to her in a babble of tongues, only some of the words coming clear and beating into her brain like the clear ringing of bells.
One was more clear than the rest.
"Kill him!"
"Yes," she answered, relaxing.
"Kill him, kill him, kill him!"
"Yes, yes!" she answered, panting.
He thought he was pleasing her with his thick a., pointed tongue in her cunt. He closed his eyes and dug deeper, pleased with her pleasure. Grunting, squirming, speaking to her through his animal hps. He was a big pale Cadillac with tastebuds puncturing her womb with his horn.
"Screw me now," she said through cold and cunning lips.
He climbed on her and thrust his big rod deep within her. She rocked upwards to meet him, her hips a savage instrument of destruction.
"Screw him to death," said a voice.
"Yes," she answered out loud.
"Is that good?" he asked her, panting and wondering how long he could hold back. "Are you ready? Christ, eating you makes me hot. I can't wait."
"I'm ready," she said, and flailed him with her cunt, going through all of the motions, allowing her voice to come out in excited satisfaction, and all the time the voice went on, "Kill, kill, kill" When she could courteously get him off of her, she rolled over and cleaned him with a towel before she set about the task of sucking the beat bent white worm that fell down almost dead against his balls. He moaned. It rose, slightly. Not quite dead. Good. She would kill it completely.
Ah, yes. Getting big, now, jumping inside her mouth, growing big in there, her teeth hardly able to contain it, top and bottom, contain it and keep from biting it, not that, she didn't want to bite the end of it off and feel all those bloody gushing veins between her teeth..
"Just screw him to death. A painless way to do it for him and happy he will be, out of his misery, tra-la- and fourteen bars of gold by Joseph Smith who was probably a faggot."
Did she say that out loud?
She hoped not.
But he didn't say anything, so she must have said it to herself.
It was long and hard and flaming at the tip. Not as long and hard as it had been, but what the hell, she had used up a lot of it inside of her, and now there was only enough left for the kill. How did one go about screwing a man to death if not by screwing? Make him use energy. This way, with his prick in her throat she was doing all the work.
Quickly she took her mouth away and put her cunt against the tip, going down slowly, with sweet and circling motions of delight for him. She watched his chest below her (not a bad sort of chest for an old man) like a chicken watches the ground for a worm. His heartbeat was strong and she frowned, impatiently as she screwed herself tightly down on his pole, sliding, down and up, touching his balls with her asshole as she screwed down again and again as tight as she could get.
Euthanasia. The killing out of kindness. A merciful death, and kind. She sat up straight as an arrow and pushed with her hands against his hard-hammering heart. It seemed that she could see his heart inside his skin, laboring to keep up with his rushing sperm. She smiled and felt his prick lurch inside of her leaping for the pitch-peak of all a man ever wants in the final analysis. It pumped upwards into her as he came and gasped and looked at her out of unseeing eyes as he struggled to breathe through his gaping mouth and his slightly slipping false teeth.
"Ahhhh!" Clutching her tightly as he came, a look of painful joy on his face. "Ahhhh, Jesus! Damn! Ahhh! Sweetheart."
She looked at him with disbelief. It was over and he was still breathing. How could that be when she thought sure it would kill him doing it two times in a row without so much as a breather in between.
Fantastic, the endurance of some of these stringy old men. Like a chicken with its head cut off, he refused to die when she had been positive she would screw him to death.
Puzzled, she slipped him out of her and fell to his side where she listened, baffled, to that strong heart that continued to beat.
She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, cunningly. Because he would soon sleep, she knew, and she must get to Mike. Must. Had to. A matter of life and death. Hers. Well, Atherton, poor bastard, his life too, but that was unimportant in the face of the value of things. First things first, and if she came first, so what? Wasn't that the balance of nature that scientists and butchering hunters talked about?
He snored. The deep gobbling sound of an old man snoring, his guts seeming to come up and into his throat and each time he would swallow them all back down. She raised up silently on her elbow and looked at him. His mouth was an open gate. His upper teeth had fallen slightly, exposing the never natural gum. And all the time that little round piece of flesh at the bottom of his throat kept flapping back and forth like some enraged rooster deprived of a hen. Throttle, throttle. Gobble, gobble, Calosh!
The knife. Of course, the knife. A boy once at school had caught his balls on a nail, sliding down the side of a house. Bled to death almost instantly.
Humane, too.
Never let it be said that Honey Lou Sheridon was inhumane. No, sir! The handle was cold in her hand as she walked stealthily back into the snore room where death preceded her and waited with its skull face grinning greedily in anticipation.
She tested the blade on her thumb. Quite sharp. Nothing like a clean sharp knifeblade. Her cook always kept the knives good and sharp and well protected in the wooden box with slots. Particular, her cook.
She stood, poised for a second over his pale body, noticing again that his prick was a sleeping slug, one of those white worms that crawl around in darkness, flat against his balls and glued down along with little matted curls of his pubic hair with his own come.
She held the knife for an instant, high in the air and then her arm swooped down in a half arc. It plunged into the softness. A piece of the white grub worm flaked off like a piece of Monterey Jack cheese.
He made a noise like a bird shot in flight.
She turned her back on him before all of the blood came gushing up, sure that she would not be pleased at the sight. As she closed the bedroom door she looked back and saw that all of it was gone, that he was holding it in his hands and trying to fasten it back onto the bloody fountaining roots. But already his hands were slipping and sliding in the gore. Feebly. Mindlessly.
"The survival of the fittest," she said with a softness that matched her sweet smile. The knife dropped to the living room rug, the point digging into the deep green pile. She stumbled to the telephone and lifted it, crying out of the wellspring of her fight for existence. "Operator, get me Michael Sheridon, quickly, his number is Manhattan, oh, hell, I don't know the area code, just a minute. I'll look it up."
Chapter XII
THE TELEPHONE SHRILLED MIKE TO CON-sciousness. He had been dreaming a nightmare spiderweb of terrifying events that culminated in a devastating tornado. They were on a sloping roof of a house. A porch roof with all the rest of the house tumbling down all around them. They sat there in silent panic as the tornado subsided, leaving them on the roof of the porch, intact and grateful for their lives. All together they sat in a wavering line, holding onto the shingles of the porch with their flat and clutching hands, looking at the fearful earth down below. Fearful because the earth was rumbling with an ominous sound. Opening a big fissure as it quaked and swallowed entire automobiles with all the screaming occupants into the dark bowels of the earth.
As he reached automatically to answer the bedside telephone, he relived the nightmare instant as the porch rocked and swayed beneath them, a pile of rubble on the right disappearing with a giant chattering of teeth into the ground. He held Honey's hand in his. She looked down at the crushing grinding rocks and rubble as they disappeared into the yawning earth. "I'll take care of you," he promised, and held her close to his chest while he listened to the rumbling sound of the earth.
Donna was there with them, the twins on her lap. He heard her laugh, shrill as a shrike's call, as Honey slid out of his arms and toppled down into the volcanic smoke, the top of her tawny head already on fire as the orange flames erupted all around her. Then the porch roof gave way underneath them and they were all sliding down into that turmoil of fire and smoke He looked up as he felt his body consumed by the icy heat of the fire. There was the face of a cherub peering at him sadly from a bureau in his long-ago mother's bedroom.
Sweating with the cold and clammy sweat of night terrors, he ran a hand across his wet chest as he answered the telephone, "Yes?"
She laughed. A low down little chuckle of mirth. "Guess what I did today, Mike."
"Honey, I told you not to call me again. You know about my heart."
"Yes, but I thought you'd get a kick out of this. I suppose you've read the papers. About my divorce?"
"Yes, Honey. I imagine everybody in America and Canada and all of Europe and Asia knows about your romance with Atherton Ellis and your divorce."
Donna sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, blinking in the glare. Her eyes were flat with hatred as she silently reached for a cigarette. She inhaled with a deep sound of contempt after the first drag. He felt her eyes on him They made him ache with despair.
Honey's voice was going on gaily, with that little trace of huskiness and that little thrilling lilt she always had when she was very happy. "So I killed him. Took a knife and stabbed him in the cock, cut it off, really, and Mike, you'd die laughing if you'd have seen him sitting up in bed struggling to put it back on there... it was amazingly funny, really." She broke off and laughed her rippling laugh while he digested her words, swallowed them and felt them bum into his guts with a searing white-hot reamed-out hollowness of fear.
"Honey, no! Honey, you didn't! Oh, my God!" The heart. Racing, racing. Galloping away his life, rushing headlong down the bloody river into death, a clot building up, thrombosis, Christ, he'd always known she would kill him in one way or another. "Please," he whispered, feeling all of his blood draining out of his system and centering on his heart. "Please, tell me you aren't telling the truth."
"No." The chuckle again. The delighted amused chuckle that made everyone who heard it laugh out loud to hear such fun. "I'm not kidding. Don't you think that's groovy? Listen, Mike, I'm in somewhat of a bind, though. Like, what the hell am I going to do with him? He's so big, you know. As big as you are, even if he is old, and dead bodies have a habit of being pretty hard to handle. I mean ... what can you do with them? Do you think you could manage to come out to the Coast and help me out? Just this one more time, Mike. And then I promise I'11 never bother you again."
"With care," said the doctor's voice, "you can live a normal life. Moderate exercise, a good diet, not too much in the drinking department, and cigarettes are out. No strain if you can avoid it." Yes. No strain. That was what the doctor had told him on the first visit after he'd been released from the hospital. Of course, by 'no strain' he meant that there should never be another telephone call from Honey, which were a strain all by themselves. But something like this! Something like her voice going on and on about the little 'scrape' she had gotten herself into -with the knowledge that she had denutted a famous playwright and left him to bleed to death in her bed or did she say she had cut off his penis? Christ! Or was she making the whole thing up? Or had she gone completely off the reality track? Yes. Without a doubt she had. He didn't know whether she was telling him the truth or not about the killing of Atherton Ellis, but whether she had actually done the horrible thing she talked about so blithely, she obviously thought she had done it, which meant that she had done an all-time freak-out.
On and on her delighted voice went, describing the scene, rationalizing as Honey always rationalized, sane or insane, "You see, I wanted to call you, I'd made up my mind that I couldn't actually marry him, Mike, and I wanted to call you, talk to you, I felt myself slipping off into that place where I go, you know? Tonight, I mean, when we went to a party. And then I made up my mind to tell him I couldn't marry him. You know. To ... I mean for him to go back to his fat little thin-lipped wife, Mike. She's got the littlest feet sticking out of her fat legs. Like the feet of a Chinese woman, all bound. Maybe I was thinking about how pitiful she was when I decided to tell him to go back to her, I don't know, but it seemed so much easier to, you know! Just cut off his prick. Easier than to come right out and tell him I couldn't marry an old man and have to look at that wrinkled old skinny flab hanging down from his chin fro the rest of my life. So I just did." He heard her yawning. His fingers clutched the hot white plastic of the princess phone. "Are you there, Mike?"
"Yes, I'm here." He heard her strike a match against the top of the match book, that sandpaper scratch and the unmistakable sound of the way her voice changed when she spoke around a cigarette, "Don't hang up on me, because I'm not kidding you, I simply can't go in that room and look at him. I mean, he was bad enough to look at when he was alive. You can imagine how vulgar and grotesque he's going to look dead! Mike. They don't always close their eyes, do they?"
"Oh, Jesus Christ, Honey Lou!" His voice broke as he sobbed into the telephone, beating the pillow where he had rested his head and suffered through what he had thought was a nightmare. The dream had been nothing to compare with this. "Stay there. Stay right there until I can get there!" He hung up.
Donna glared at him. "if you go to her this time, you might as well know you'll have nothing to come home to. You might as well stay there with her for good, Mike." Donna, defeated in the gloom of the bedroom, the quiet right of the nightstand lamp backlighting her black black hair. "Heart or no heart, I've got to think of myself, Mike. Myself and the girls."
"You don't understand. Honey's killed a man!"
"I'm not surprised. And I could care less. I wish she'd killed herself."
"Yes, I know." He reached for the telephone again and found out that by rushing he could make a plane in forty-five minutes. He hung up and turned to his wife. "1 don't suppose you'd drive me to the airport?"
"You suppose absolutely right," she said bitterly. "Mike, you fool! You utter, utter fool!" The words were torn out of her mouth rotten, like a molar tooth full of abscess, torn out of the pus-filled gums. He knew when he heard the words how rotten they were, how much she had wanted to say them, how many times she had wanted to say them and had not. Instead she had covered them up with a layer of tolerance as false as tooth enamel is false with a festering ulcer underneath the whiteness.
He called a cab.
As he stood in the mid-morning doorway with the dark light of dawn reaching down into his face and covering him with a shroud of iniquity she came out of the bedroom and looked at him from the middle of the living room floor, her hands folded at her waist. "Mike, please."
Something inside of him twisted and convulsed. "I've got to go, Donna, don't you see that?"
The filmy black silk of her nightgown made her face suddenly stark white, her eyes two black and swimming coals of anguish. She had never been more beautiful. She shrugged and turned her back on him, padding on silent feet back into the bedroom while he watched as the thing inside of him twisted and melted and grew into a stone that fell into his chest and bumped up the sides of his lungs as it lodged there.
At the airport he bought a pack of cigarettes, his first in months, and ran to catch the plane, already tearing at the pack, his mouth set and ready for the comforting taste of tobacco smoke.
As he climbed the steps he heard somebody close at hand saying, "Well I guess we all kill ourselves one way or another." And thought, How true, brother, how true, ducking as he went inside into the smell of leather and the perfume of women passengers who had just left the plane.
Changing in Chicago at O'Hare he ran again because there was exactly seven minutes and O'Hare is a city unto itself, big enough to set the whole of the city of LeRoy, Illinois, down inside of its brightly lighted importance.
Eleven hours including the stop in Chicago and thirty-seven minute taxi ride to Honey's apartment with the taxi driver speaking in the sunshine day as if he were just another customer with a relative in the exclusive apartment complex where Honey lived. .
"There's a lotta stars live in this here building, 'course, I expect you're gonna visit one of 'em, but lots people get a thrill just to drive by. Pay good money, too, just to drive by the outside of a place and I always add a little to the story. I say Honey Sheridon lives here and hell, if I don't know fur sure I just make up a buncha stuff, they don't know the difference. Take .these old ladies. They nearly cream their britches just to look at the outside of some of these places."
The doorman with his brass shining under the sun, hot to touch, that brass. "Miss Sheridon? Is she expecting you, sir?"
"Yes. I'm her brother."
The immaculate officious hand punching the proper button and Honey's voice slightly strained, "Yes?" "Your brother here to see you, Miss Sheridon." "Oh, thank you, thank you!"
Her face was gray with strain. Her mouth was tense but still with lines around it, a downward turn to it as she whispered urgently to him and dragged him inside the luxurious room. "Mike. Mike. When they're dead they look so very dead!" Big amber eyes staring at him madly, insanely, as she whispered and chattered in a barely audible tone of voice. And he still didn't know whether she had killed anybody or not. Her illusions were so vivid.
"Where is he?"
She pointed. "In there. I looked in already. Inside his fingers he's still got that little piece of shriveled prick. Sure was important to him, wasn't it?"
"God. Good GodV His eyes looked at the mess on the bed and looked away. A stench of blood, still slightly warmish and sweet smelling was in the air of the room, mingling with stale cigarette smoke and the slightly decaying smell of the dead man. Dandruff and age. Mouthwash and cocktails and expensive food that aided and abetted the aging process, all of it eating into Mike's quivering nostrils as he saw a smear of defecation against the sheet, with Honey pointing to the brownish stain and babbling away, "He shit, Mike. Look at that. I didn't know dead people shit."
"Inconsiderate as hell of him, wasn't it?"
"Don't be mad at me, Mike." Pouting. Pouting prettily as she always did when she had done something to aggravate him and knew she had.
He shut the door and closed the odors in there with the deadness where it belonged.
Breathlessly, she threw herself into his arms, covering his throat with warm honey flavored kisses, the scent of lemon in her hair. "What are we going to do, Mike? It's against the law to kill people, isn't it?"
"Yes, Honey." He was so tired. The iron in his chest was beginning to turn from a cold lump of hardness to a burning one, traveling down his arm, into his chest, cutting off his breath, stabbing him with the cutting edge of it, like an electric meat slicing knife turned on and cutting through his chest, an electric knife run by an invisible hand.
He spoke with effort. "You live twenty floors up?"
"Yes. Why?"
"I'd like to see the view from twenty floors over Los Angeles. Come with me to the windows."
As she walked with him to the window his hand went without his telling it to the place where the pain was, as if he would cover it, keep it in there, keep it from rupturing through his chest, and destroying him. Her arm was cool and smooth and wonderful to touch as he caressed it for the last time.
"What's the matter, Mike? Does your heart hurt? I'm sorry I had to call you and bother you. Really I am."
He maneuvered her so her back was to the window. He bent his head down and kissed her softly, gently, sweetly, on her lips. "I didn't mind, Honey Lou. It's always a pleasure to hear your voice." Drawing his other hand reluctantly from his chest, he held both of her arms tightly for a moment and gazed into her beautiful eyes. Then he rammed her through the window, head first. The glass broke and sounded like a pistol shot and far down below seconds later was the sound of glass shattering on the sidewalk. It was like the sound of a thermometer breaking on a hospital floor.
"Mike! What do you think you're ..." She stopped talking and yelled, her hands grasping at his sleeves, clinging, clawing, tearing all the long honey-bisque nails off as they fought.
Her feet were the last thing he saw. Small and defenseless feet with the toes all curled up as they banged against the brick on the side of the building. He covered his ears with both hands to blot out the sound of the long and diminishing yell that was torn by the wind from her mouth as she fell. He leaned out and saw her land on top of a brown dog being walked by the doorman. The dog was flattened without a yelp. Honey seemed to melt into the sidewalk and to bounce upwards slightly before she settled back down into several fragments of Honey nevermore.
The doorman looked up. His hand dropped the leash of the flattened brown dog. He cried out, pointing, "Look at that son of a bitch leaning out the window grinning. He pushed her, the bastard!"
A delivery boy with two dozen blood red roses looked up with younger eyes than the doorman. "He ain't grinning, buddy. That's what they call a death grimace."
EPILOGUE Six months later Aunt Laura gathered all the clan of the brothers and sisters of the late Honor Lou and Michael William Sheridon around her. The wills had been read and the relatives had already given ten per cent of what they had inherited to the church.
"I'm going to tell you children something I always promised your mother and father I never would so much as mention. But, well, what with what Donna said, poor little thing, maybe I should have broken my promise a long time ago. The thing of it is, well, your mother and father thought they couldn't have any children. They'd been married over four years and there was no sign of a child, so they adopted one.
"That was Michael.
"Funny, isn't it? I mean how things work out. Seems like after they got relaxed, sort of, it was easy as pie to have babies. Well, that's the way things work. As I always say, the Lord works in wondrous ways."
