Just a sprawling, three-story white building in the pines beside a mountain lake; nothing special about it to the naked eyes. But to the naked sinners who took advantage of its unique services, no fleshcult temple of ancient Rome, no Storyville parlor house, could match the lust that seethed like a musty fog behind its prim green shutters. From room to room, couple to couple, passion flowed, and with each new sin, each new twisted hunger, another flicker of decency snuffed out. It was a house of shame with lost souls wailing their passion cries into the heavy night. And some of the worst-and they were all bad-included Jeff, the sly bellhop Master of Sin Ceremonies; Ora, the ex-hooker who had found a unique way of living off the spoils of sin; Kathy, the slim brunette woman-lover who showed the sin-mad Mary Lou how to quench the raging fires that gnawed at her sanity; and there were others. Busy as bees filling their honeycombed hotel with the passion flow of degradation. And they hummed and hummed as they buzzed from body to body and bed to bed and shame to shame.
CHAPTER ONE
Jeff had a little trouble finding the place. He had left New York in the morning, taking it slow and easy on the drive up so that the old Chevy wouldn't boil over and spoil things. It was around four when he crossed the State Line into Vermont. He took Route 7 through Bennington and Arlington and Manchester and Rutland and Wallingford and Middlebury and on into Vergennes, which was the town Cadbury's Lodge used for a mailing address.
The drive that far was a cinch The roads were winding two-laners, the traffic was light, and a layer of clouds masked the full force of the late-June sun. Signs told him to stop here for maple sugar or here for antiques or here for genuine deerskin handbags. He didn't stop. He noticed the calm patterned beauty of the countryside almost abstractly. It was nice, but he wasn't absorbed in it. It was all well and good, and he was glad it was there, but he had other things on his mind.
In Vergennes, he got slightly lost. He pulled over to the side of the road and went over the involved letter from Cadbury's Lodge again, trying to piece out the directions. In Vergennes, he was supposed to turn left at Route 22A, which was the main street of the town. He was supposed to go to the Basin Harbor turn-off, swing onto that road and hold it steady, staying on it past the second Basin Harbor turn-off. Then he was supposed to make a left at something called Panton Comers, make a right after the cemetery, and-
It took an hour, but he got there. After his last turn-off, he followed a winding one-lane gravel road through a grove of cedar and white pine, then pulled up in front of a weather-beaten, three-story, sprawling frame building. White clapboard, green shutters. A sign, small and unobtrusive in a last-ditch attempt at class. Cadbury's Lodge.
He braked the Chevy, then sat for a moment and lit a cigarette before getting out of the car. Here we are, he thought Bert we are, from now until Labor Day. A summer under the pines on the beautiful shores of world-famous Lake Champlain. A summer as a combination bellhop and houseman, earning a hot two hundred and fifty bucks for the whole summer, plus whatever tips he could pry out of the guests. A summer of swimming in the lake and goofing off in the woods and trying to figure oat what he would do after Labor Day.
He wouldn't be going back to school. His parents, snug and mindless in their flat in Jackson Heights, thought he was going back to school. But the authorities at Clifton College had other ideas. He had had a nice thing going for awhile, pilfering equipment from the chem lab and the bio department, running the stuff into Dayton and hocking it for pocket money. A sweet little racket. Except it had hit a rather annoying snag when they had caught him on his way out of the Sci Building at four m the morning with a microscope under his shirt and a set of dissecting tools in his pocket.
The school kept it quiet. They sat him down in the Dean's office, and Dean Maples hemmed and hawed and huffed at him; and the upshot of it was that they were not going to press charges, that in view of his excellent scholastic record they were not even going to expel him per se, that he would be allowed to finish out the term. But he could not return to Clifton College. Ever.
So what next? Transfer to another school? Join the goddamned army?
What?
He ground out the cigarette in the dashboard ash tray. Hell with it, he thought. There was a whole summer first, a whole summer to worry it all out. In the meantime, he had other fish to fry.
He opened the car door, stepped out, reached into the back seat for his suitcase. He was a tall boy, eighteen years old, with a slim build and bright blue eyes and the hair the color of wet sand. He slammed the door of the Chevy, hefted the suitcase and carried it to the lodge. The suitcase was fairly heavy but he carried it easily. He climbed the steps to the porch, stood in front of the door for a moment, then pushed a bell. A set of chimes played eight notes, then repeated them a second time. The chimes sounded a little out of tune.
Tt took a full-minute before the woman answered the door. She was a big woman, full-bodied, blonde. She stood looking at Jeff through the screen door without moving to open it. She did not say anything.
He said: "I'm Jeff Baylor."
"Oh," she said. Her face relaxed slightly into a smile and she stepped aside to open the door. "I'm Ora Cadbury," she said. "I was hoping you'd get here today. Jeff The guests start arriving tomorrow. We don't have much time to get you into the swing of things."
She was younger than he had guessed from her letters-or from her role, maybe When you thought about the place called Cadbury's way the hell off in Vermont, you pictured some old crone who sat around in a rocker and crocheted things. Ora Cadbury was no schoolgirl, but she wasn't a crone, either. About forty-five, he guessed, and stiD pretty lively. He followed her into the main room of the lodge and sat down in the seat she pointed at. She crossed one leg over the other and lit a cigarette. He lit one himself. She smiled.
"I'd better explain the routine to you," she said. "We've gone over that through the mails, but an exchange of letters doesn't cover everything thoroughly. Stop me if you've got any questions, will you?"
He nodded. She started talking and he half-listened to most of it The staff had to get up at seven in the morning. Staff breakfast was at seven-thirty. He was to spend the day around the lodge proper, helping new guests with their luggage, hauling laundry down to the laundry room, running interference for the maids, helping outgoing guests with their luggage, assisting fishing parties, and so on. Staff lunch was when he could catch it, and staff dinner was at a quarter to six, in the kitchen.
The nights are your own," she said. "And one night a week you can leave the premises and take a run into town, if you feel like it."
She stopped. He looked at her, uncertain. Either he hadn't heard her right or-
"If the nights are my own," he said, "I don't set it"
"You don't?"
"I don't think so."
She drew a breath. "Then I'll explain," she said. "Listen. Do you know what kind of people we get at a place like Cadbury's? There are a few different types. There are the married couples trying to get away from their kids for a little relaxation. Some of them are looking for a second honeymoon, others just want some sun and peace and quiet; others want to find another congenial couple and play switchie-poo in the bedrooms. That's one category. The married couples.
"Then there are men who come up for the fishing. Lake Champlain's pretty good that way-bass and pike and pickerel and some other things, I don't know what. They come up for the fishing, and they like their liquor, and some of them want girls to share their beds with them. So that's another class. The men.
"And then there are the women. City girls, almost entirely. New York, Boston-that's where the bulk of them come from. They teach school or they punch typewriters for fifty weeks a year, or whatever, and they save their pennies in a piggy bank so that they can afford two weeks at a resort. In the city they live with their parents and lead quiet lives and try their damnedest to get married, but they don't make it. At Cadbury's they're still looking for husbands, but after two or three days they realize they aren't going to find husbands and they decide to settle for the next best thing."
She stubbed her cigarette out viciously. "Damn fools," she said. "If they had any brains they wouldn't want husbands in the first place. All a husband does is sit and get drunk. Oh, the hell with it. Where was I?"
"You were saying that they settle for the next best thing."
She nodded. "They want romance," she said. "They want a summertime lover to take walks with them along the lakeshore and kiss their necks and feel their boobies and reach up under their skirts. Hey, am I embarrassing you?"
"Not especially."
She laughed. "Hey, you're okay! Anyway, that's what they want. Sometimes they don't want the sex, just the romance. It depends on the girl and how goddamn frustrated she is. Sometimes they just want somebody to dance with and flirt with and all. If they get lucky, they find one of the single male guys who thinks they're the greatest thing since the wheel. But we get more girls than guys. Every resort does. So the male help has to help out"
"Meaning me?"
"Meaning you. Meaning the kitchen staff, and the other bellhop, and the waterfront director, and meaning you. You have to be around six nights a week to make sure these girls don't feel lonely. If they feel lonely, then they have a lousy summer. If they have a lousy summer they don't come back to Cadbury's next year, and they tell their friends not to come either, and Ora Cadbury goes broke. We don't want that to happen, do we?"
"I guess not."
"You don't have to be a goddamn stud," Ora Cadbury said. "Just use your head."
"My head?"
She laughed wickedly. "You know goddamn well what I mean. You don't have to make passes at 'em. Wait until they make the first move. Then give the girl what she wants. If she wants to look at the moon, look at the moon with her. If she wants to neck, neck with her. If she wants the whole works-"
"Sure," he said.
"That's why I wanted a picture of you with the application. You have to be good-looking to work here. That's Cadbury's claim to fame, you know. The facilities, the layout-strictly mediocre. The activities, the food-fair to middling. But the scenery's nice and the fishing is good and the employees are handsome and they can go like stallions. Can you go like a stallion, Jeff?"
He decided that he was damned if she would embarrass him. "You could audition me," he told her. 'If you had asked. I could have sent you a picture through the mail. But maybe you'd like a live demonstration instead."
At first she didn't know whether or not to take him seriously. Then she threw back her head and laughed uproariously. Her breasts shook with her laughter and he let his eyes linger on them. Come to think of it, he told himself, maybe she wouldn't be so bad. She was pretty old. but she looked and acted as though she could really ball like a champion.
"Come on," she said. "Come on, you louse. I'll show you where your room is. Then you can unpack and wash up and get to work."
Kathy Mills leaned against one of the beams that were supporting the dining room ceiling and waited for Mr. and Mrs. Lee Yarrow to finish their dinner. Cadbury's Lodge had a top capacity of sixty persons, although Kathy had already guessed that half that number at one time would thrill Ora Cadbury and her drunken husband to the cores of their beings. Now, however, the guest list had only two names on it. There was Mr. Lee Yarrow and there was Mrs. Lee Yarrow, and that, by the beard of Zeus, was all there was.
The Yarrows were newlyweds. Two days ago, they had been married. Immediately upon the completion of the wedding they had come at once to Cadbury's Lodge, where the virgin blood of Mrs. Yarrow promptly decorated the bed linen. Now they spent every day looking deep into one another's eyes and drinking their fill of each other. Every hour or so they would grin wickedly at each other and run off to their room to make the bedsprings sing nasty songs for a little while. In another week or so they would go off to their home in Boston to make little Yarrows-if, in fact, they hadn't started one already.
Kathy couldn't stand them.
For one thing, they made her work two days more than she had planned on working. The guests weren't supposed to start coming until tomorrow, and she had figured on a few days of nothing much to do. But the damned Yarrows ate their damned three meals a day, and she served them those three meals a day and Mary Lou made their bed once a day (and giggled constantly about the condition of the bedroom) and they were just a pain in the neck all around.
But that wasn't the main reason that Kathy hated the Yarrows. It was reason enough, to be sure, but that wasn't all there was to it.
She hated them because they weie in love. And because they went to bed together, and obviously enjoyed it.
The Yarrows pushed away from the table, stood up, headed for the door. Kathy caught a phrase of conversation, something about loving on a bed of pine needles. Jesus, she thought, they were going to knock off a piece in the great outdoors. She said a fervent prayer for a thunderstorm.
Hell. They probably wouldn't even notice it.
Quickly she cleared the dishes from their table, brushed crumbs onto her tray, and took the tray back to the kitchen. The cooks-four former Navy men, all of whom wanted to get into Kathy's pants-made their perfunctory verbal passes. As usual, she brushed the passes aside with a wink and a smile and a coy remark. No sense letting them know just how things stood, she thought. Let them peg her as a reluctant virgin. They were a pretty hard bunch, but as long as they thought she was a good girl, properly sweet and innocent, they would let her alone.
She wanted to be let alone.
She was twenty years old bat she could have passed for seventeen if she wanted to. Short, slender, built boyishly in the breasts and hips. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, thin-lipped, neat and precise in her movements. Nose tip-tilted, teeth bright and regular, shoulders lightly freckled.
Pretty.
Damned pretty.
She got out of her little waitress costume in her room, then changed to slacks and a moderately clean sweatshirt. One of her tennis shoes had come untied She tied it tightly, and of course that made the other one feel loose. She tightened it. Then she left her room and walked out to the front porch of the lodge for a cigarette.
The porch was virtually deserted when she got there. Owen Cadbury sprawled in a rocker, swaying slightly and breathing heavily; but his presence counted no more on the porch than it did anywhere else in the lodge. Sweet old Owen, Kathy thought. The alcoholic husband of the old witch. Ora and Owen, proprietors of a third-class dung hill on the shores of placid Lake Champlain.
God above.
She sat down heavily in some half-assed Victorian's idea of a stylish chair, dug out a cigarette from the pocket of her plaid slacks, lit it with a Zippo, and smoked industriously. Well, she thought, tomorrow was the day. Ora must be sweating up a storm-if the guests came she made a living, and if the guests didn't come she starved. Right now, she thought, Ora was praying that the guests would come.
So Kathy prayed that they wouldn't.
She looked over the top of her cigarette. Outside, one of the kitchen crew was walking Mary Lou Timmel through the piney woods. Mary Lou's blonde pony tail bounced joyfully, and the boy had his arm around her waist and was obviously getting up his nerve for a grab at one of Mary Lou's lush breasts. And, in a few minutes, the two of them would roll around in the woods. And Mary Lou would come back with pine needles sticking to her rear.
Kathy felt sick to her stomach.
At the beginning, she remembered, she had had vague hopes for Mary Lou TrimmeL The girl was lovely, and she had a big bountiful body that you could easily get lost in. And there had been something about her eyes, something in her glance, that had gotten Kathy's hopes up somewhat. Which was ridiculous.
She sucked angrily on her cigarette, then dropped it on the floor and squashed it under a shoe. Face it, Mills, she told herself angrily. You're stuck. For a pretty round peg, you picked a hell of a square hole to wind up in. A whole world out there, and you had to get stuck in Cadbury's Lodge.
It was quite probable, she thought dully, that she was the only lesbian in the entire state of Vermont.
She thought it over, then decided she was being ridiculous. There was a girl's college at Bennington, and everyone knew that half the girls at Bennington went down on the other half every night of the week. So there might well be dykes in Vermont (although, to be sure, they were from out of state) but there sure as hell were not any dykes in Cadbury's.
Except for her.
She heard footsteps, turned her head. A new bellhop-Jeff Something-or-other, she had forgotten his name since he had been introduced all around at dinner-was on his way out to the porch. She didn't feel like company, especially male company. She got up quickly, went into the lodge again through the other door. He called to her on his way out to the porch but she pretended not to hear him. She went up the stairs again to her room and closed the door. She hesitated, sighed, and slid the bolt home.
Then she closed the drapes.
Then she took off all her clothes.
Then she lay down on the bed, on her back.
Then she closed her eyes.
Then-
In the secret window of her mind, she was not alone.
She was back at Sonny's apartment and the drapes were drawn and she and Sonny were deliriously together in Sonny's big double bed. She was holding Sonny's bulging breasts in her own hot, little hands, and she could feel the stiffness of Sonny's nipples against her itching palms, and her mouth was dry and her head was swimming....
In reality, her hands cupped her own small, but nicely shaped, young breasts. Her fingers did clever things, pulling and pinching at the nipples, playing with them, making them harden with the initial elements of passion. She was breathing deeply through her mouth and her feet made tiny motions at the foot of the bed, involuntary motions caused by the onset of passion.
In her mind's eye, she could see Sonny on her back now, arms thrown wide, eyes shut, mouth slack. And she was curled up at Sonny's side, hungry mouth pressed to the soft sweet underside of Sonny's breast. She was kissing and nipping the soft flesh and her body was burning and her hands were on Sonny's thighs.
In reality, her own hands stole over her own thighs, touching the silk-soft skin and sending visions of driving passion through her brain. Her fingers moved, coming closer and closer to their goal and every second new waves of passion overwhelmed her and her hips began to writhe in the age-old rhythms of love and her skin was on fire and her brain was burning.
In her mind's eye, she and Sonny were making mad passionate love, love that was completely fulfilling. In her mind's eye, the world was swimming and the gods were smiling and they rolled together and tossed together and screamed out declarations of love together. And in her mind's eye, she was with Sonny and Sonny was with her and they were climbing together, striving together, reaching together, yearning together, seeking together, straining together for the other side of the lustful lesbian moon.
But in reality, she was just lying there-caressing her-
After Ora Cadbury had finished paying the bills-a chore she never particularly relished, and one she absolutely loathed at the beginning of a season, when ail the money was going out and absolutely nothing was coming in-she walked a half-mile down the road to stick the letters in the mailbox. She could have taken one of the cars-the station wagon or the VW. But she felt like walking. The air was cool and clear and it gave her a chance to get away from herself, and from the lodge.
She was damned nervous. This was the fourth season for Cadbury's Lodge, and this was the one that would make or break them. The first year they had lost a pile of money, which was to be expected. You always lost money the first year. The second year they had lost t little money, but it wasn't really bad. Last year they had made enough over and above living expenses to support them after a fashion over the winter-which was damned fortunate, since their principal had by now withered away to less than a thousand dollars.
This year, one of two things would happen. They would have another break-even season, in which case she would sell the place and leave both Vermont and Owen Cadbury and find another house to haunt, or they would make a nice pile of money and have no future worries about the success or failure of Cadbury's Lodge. That was one cockeyed thing about the resort business. Once you were popular, you had it made. Once it became impossible to get into your place, everybody and his brother wanted to. When you were either new or unsuccessful, when you would go out of your way to make guests enjoy themselves, when you gave your goddamn all, then they passed you up and went to some crowded hole where not even the waiters would spit on them.
One good season would make the place. But an innkeeper's search for that one good season can be as much of a snipe hunt as a nympho's search for one satisfying lover. You never score, and you never stop trying, and away we go-
There were so damned many variables. Right now, Ora realized, she had enough reservations to break even. This did not mean they would break even. They might lose their shirts or they might make a fortune-it could go either way.
In the first place, half the people with reservations might stay home. A nice spell of stinking weather in Vermont could do it. So, for that matter, could a nice spell of pleasant weather in New York and Boston.
In the second place, a whole load of people could show up without reservations. It happened. You could never predict it, and you could never count on it. but it happened. So it could go either way. They could win or they could lose, and she had to spend her time until then sitting on her ass and praying.
As far as she could tell, everything was moving along nicely so far. The staff, while hardly competent, fulfilled its chief requirement. The girls were all easy on the eyes and the boys were as fine a crew of young studs as any resort could boast. She thought about the most recent arrival the bellhop, Jeff Baylor. A good-looking son of a gun, she thought. And very, very cool and self-possessed. You had to watch the extraordinarily good-looking ones-half the time they turned out to be fags, and faggoty bellhops didn't exactly endear a resort to a batch of frustrated stenographers. But this one wasn't a queer. She would bet her boobs on it.
She started to throw her cigarette away, then stopped. Hell, all she needed was a nice little forest fire. All of Cadbury's, burned up and gone. Though, come to think of it, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad move after all. The place was insured, and the insurance money was more dough than they would ever see out of the old barn, and-
She dropped the cigarette onto the gravel and stomped on it. Come off it, she told herself. It's not that bad. You're just running a resort, and there's nothing to it. You send out the brochures, you play it up big for the travel agents, you advertise politely in the Times and the Globe and a few other papers, you provide the guests with edible food and clean sheets and a lake to fish in and woods to romp in and places to make love in, and everybody goes home happy and you make a lot of money.
That was all there was to it.
Sure.
Just like that
As she neared the lodge, she thought hopefully that maybe Owen would be sober enough to perform in his dubious capacity of husband. God, she needed it. When you got tense like this, when the place was set to open and you were busy worrying about a good crowd and a decent balance sheet, a session in the hay could do wonders for you. But there was about as much chance of Owen getting it up as there was of Lake Champlain evaporating overnight.
Damn it, she was at the awkward age-too old to get it steady and too young to live without it.
She laughed at that. Hell, she just wasn't the resort type, she thought. She should have stayed in the rackets, should have gone on taking all comers in Newport. If she had stuck with the rackets and kept up her connections, she'd be running her own house by now. And that was one thing about owning a whorehouse as opposed to a resort: you never had to worry about making ends meet.
Mary Lou Timmel looked up at the sky. The moon was hazy, which meant either that it was going to rain tomorrow or that it wasn't. She could never remember which it was, and she didn't believe it anyway, so it didn't really matter.
She yawned, stretched. The air was cool, and the breeze felt almost as good on her bare breasts as the pine needles did on her bare rump. Everything felt good, come to think of it. And Kenny, who was lying on his side next to her, had felt absolutely wonderful. All firm and hard and panting and wanting her, and very large, and just wonderful-
She thought about it, and that got her horny all over again. It was amazing, she thought. All she had to do was think about it and she got as hot as a fire. Once, riding the subway, she had seen the bulge in the front of the pants of a husky Negro, and the thought of it excited her so much that she had to run straight over to Alan Lukin's apartment for a fast one. It was amazing. Just a thought, or an idea, or an image, or a memory, was enough to get her ready.
She was ready now.
She rolled over slowly. Kenny was lying on his side, his eyes closed. He was around thirty, she guessed, a man who had finished two four-year hitches in the Navy and who was now trying to decide whether to re-enlist again or to stick to civilian life. She had already shown him some of the nice things about civilian life. Now maybe she could show him a few more.
She put a hand on his shoulder, ran it down over one arm. He had crossed daggers tattooed on the arm, and a flag on his chest. She sort of liked the tattooes.
She said: "Hey."
He opened his eyes. He looked at her and smiled the smile of a satisfied man. "Happy?"
"Mmmmm," he said. "Was I good?"
"You were great. I thought-"
"What?"
"Oh, I don t know. That you hadn't been around much, I guess."
"Why'd you think that?"
"Because you're just a kid."
"Did you think I was a virgin?"
"That or close to it."
She giggled. "Not me," she said "Not by a mile."
"Yeah, I figured as much."
She put both hands on his hairy chest and tugged at the hairs like a playful kitten with a ball of yarn. He grinned and pushed her hands away. She giggled again and squirmed up against him, rubbing her breasts against his chest, loving the way his chest stimulated her hot little nipples and made them quiver with lust. Then she pulled away from him and pointed at her nipples.
"Look what you did," she said.
"I did that?"
"Uh-huh. You got me all hot."
"Baby," he said, "you were born hot."
"Maybe, but you got me hot all over again. What are you going to do about it?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"Guess."
"Again?"
"Uh-huh."
"Jesus." He shook his head. "Don't you ever get enough?"
"Never."
"What the hell. I'm tired, baby."
"I thought you sailors never got tired."
"Well, if the honor of the Navy's at stake-" He laughed, then pulled her close. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you a brand-new trick. I learned it off a whore in Cairo. Come on, baby, I'll educate you."
She was always willing to learn. And he was a good educator.
He educated her until she couldn't see straight.
CHAPTER TWO
As you pass through Manchester on Route 7, there is a stretch of expensive homes and estates that managed to reach the ultimate in luxury without seeming ostentatious. At nine-fifteen, as the big Oldsmobile passed through this section, Charles Turner said to his wife: "Nice homes here."
These were the first words the Turners had spoken since waking up that morning in a Massachusetts motel. Lydia Turner did not answer. , An hour or so later, on the road from Middlebury to Vergennes, Charles Turner spoke again. "I can see it now," he said. "This is going to be a real peach of a vacation. One for the books."
Lydia didn't answer him.
It was best, she thought, when he did not talk to her.
At such times she could pretend he wasn't there, and if she could convince herself that he was not there it was almost as ideal as if that were the truth-as if he wasn't there at all. Lydia Turner wished her husband were somewhere far away. She did not like him. In fact, she hated his guts.
And now, ludicrously enough, they were off to the wilds of Vermont, where they would have nothing on earth to do but be with each other. There were plenty of other places they could have gone on this vacation. They could have gone to Las Vegas, for instance. In Las Vegas, all the casinos and clubs and restaurants operate twenty-four hours a day. By a little judicious planning, they could have arranged it so that one of them slept days while the other slept nights, and if they adhered to this schedule religiously it would have been impossible for them to share a room together without setting eyes on each other once in the entire two-week vacation.
Which would have been a blessing.
Instead, they were on their merry way to Cadbury's Lodge, which sounded like a pretty grim proposition. They could fish, except that they didn't like to. They could lie on the beach, except that Lydia's skin burned whenever she went outdoors, sun or no sun, and lying on the beach was her idea of nothing to do. They could breathe fresh air and take hikes in the woods and get to know one another, except that, as we have seen, they happened to hate each other.
So the whole thing was crazy.
The sore point, she thought, was that the vacation had a purpose behind it. Vacations should not have purposes. They should be undertaken in a just-for-the-hell-of-it spirit-when this is the case, they stand a fair chance of turning out successfully, God willing. But when people go on a vacation in order to salvage a dead marriage, the vacation is foredoomed.
This was what had happened with them. Charles Turner was 38. Lydia, his wife, was 34. They had been married seven years, and they hated each other. Various things reinforced this hate-like Lydia finding out that Charles was sleeping with his secretary, and like Charles catching Lydia in the bushes with what's-her-name's husband at the party a few weeks ago, and little things like that. The separate causes of this mutual need not be inspected. We need only know that it existed.
What do smart married couples do when they find out that they hate each other?
Answer: They get divorced.
In time, Lydia thought, they would do just that. But in the meantime they were making the grand old American try of saving their marriage. It had been Charles who had thought it up: "A couple of weeks in the mountains, alone, away from this damn hectic city, where we can get to fall in love all over again."
Phooey.
Horse phooey.
Lydia sighed. Well, hell. They were stuck with each other, at least for two weeks. After the vacation had come to a staggering halt, and after they were back in the good old hectic damn city again, she could get together with a clever lawyer and see about severing the tie that bound them. In the meantime, she would do her best to spend as much time alone as possible and as little time with Charles as possible, and, if possible, to live through the two weeks of marital monotony without any lasting ill effects.
"We're here," Charles announced.
She looked up at the big white frame lodge. Cadbury's Lodge, she read.
Hurray.
About the time that Jeff Baylor was transferring the Turners' luggage from the trunk of the Olds to their second floor room, three girls in a rented Ford hit the city limits of Vergennes.
"Virgins, Vermont," Elsie Radin said. "Smallest city in the United States. How do they know?"
Tillie Hayes and Lacie Marmon shrugged simultaneously. "Maybe they don't know," Lacie said. "Maybe it's not the smallest city, but they just say so. For a joke."
"They've got 4,000 people here," Tillie said. "There are smaller cities than that, aren't there?"
"But they aren't cities," Elsie said. "They're villages, see? Or towns, or something. I remember now, it said so in the brochure from Mrs. Cadbury. The smaller ones are villages, and this is the smallest city."
"Was that in the brochure?"
"Uh-huh. I just remembered."
"Oh."
The three girls sat in the front seat of the Ford. Elsie was doing the driving. She was a brunette. The other girls had been brunettes originally. This year, though, they were blondes. They thought that only Miss Clairol was aware of the deception, but anyone with a good eye could have seen their dark roots.
Elsie Radin was the prettiest of the group, with good if not striking features, but she was a little flat-chested. Lacie Marmon had a long nose and poor teeth, but her breasts were the largest. Tillie Hayes had medium-sized breasts and medium features-if that makes any sense-but she ran a little to fat.
The three of them spent fifty weeks out of every fifty-two weeks typing letters and memos and other assorted bits of trivia for the New York Midland Equitable Life Assurance Corporation Of North America, known to those in the know as NYMELACNA. Sometimes the initials were pronounced separately; at other times they were said as one word, Nymelacna, which, when you say it properly, sounds like a vitamin deficiency disease.
They now had two weeks of paid vacation. They were going to spend it, naturally enough, at Cadbury's Lodge.
Elsie said: "God, it's going to be nice to be out of that hot smelly city." This meant: God, with a little luck there could be a nice guy there, maybe a med student or something, and we could get married, and I wouldn't have to live in the Bronx any more.
Lacie said: "Listen, I'm telling you, all I want to do is relax. Just lie around twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do." This meant: There just better be men. There better be men, because I'm so sick of being home by eleven every night and necking quietly in the living room so my damn father doesn't wake up, and God if somebody doesn't take me soon I'm going to scream.
TUlie said: "How peaceful it seems. Doesn't it seem all peaceful?" This meant: "Already I'm bored stiff. Why the hell did I ever leave Brooklyn, anyway?"
"Just think," Lacie said. "Two whole weeks. You think oar money'll hold out?"
"Sure."
"I hope. You sure you weren't supposed to turn there?"
"Listen, who's doing the driving?"
"You are, I guess."
"If you got any complaints, take it up with the management, dear."
"I love you too. Listen, are you positive?"
"That's the lodge. So who's positive?"
Elsie stopped the car. They got out and started walking toward the lodge, not sure whether they were supposed to be happy or disappointed with the place. They decided that they would have to see how things turned out
By noon, another couple had checked in-not a couple, exactly, but two middle-aged men named Frank and Joe who were already out on the lake with a case of beer and a boat full of fishing tackle. With the honeymooning Yarrows and the not-speaking Turners and the three little maids from Nymelacna, that made a grand total of nine occupants for Cadbury's Lodge-neither particularly bad nor particularly good for noon of the First Day.
Jeff Baylor hoped nobody else came that afternoon.
For one thing, it was fairly hot. Not too hot to be comfortable sitting in the shade, but a little too hot to work up much of an appetite for baggage-carrying. So far, baggage-carrying had been pretty much of a drag. He had had the Turners himself, and that had been worth a buck to him, but for that buck he had had to drag half the luggage in the world up too many stairs, had had to wait while Mrs. Turner looked around the room as if expecting to find bugs under every piece of furniture, and had finally pocketed the hot dollar and had headed off before something horrible happened.
Tim, the other bellhop, had caught the fishermen. It had turned out to be a good catch, too-at least according to Tim. Probably a better catch than the fishermen would make all day, since they had asked Tim a mess of questions about fishing possibilities and Tim, who knew nothing along those lines, had invented some elaborate answers which bore little resemblance to reality. But they had been good for a buck apiece, and Tim said there was more where that came from. In a day or so they would want liquor or women, and Tim would make good money on them.
Great for Tim.
Nothing much for one Jeff Baylor, however.
And then the three little maids from school. Or from the typing pool somewhere, really. Three cheap New York witches, the ones he was probably going to be called upon to service in order to keep his job. God, they were bad news. Not so bad to look at, actually, just innately cruddy. And no tip at all. Two suitcases per broad-he and Tim had shared them, so that made it three suitcases per manand nothing but a wink from one of them and a promise from another to "take care of them later." He had an idea what that care entailed, and he wasn't exactly thrilled about it.
The idea of spending the summer at stud didn't exactly turn him on. Even if the broads in question were good-looking, there was something about the idea of making himself exactly available that went against the grain. If you were a man, you didn't loll around waiting for a girl to get an itch and then summon you up grandly to scratch it for her. In the first place, you did the picking. In the second place, you got the itch first, and you were the one who conned the girl into lying on her back and looking at the moon. The role of the seducer was a manly role. The role of gigolo didn't have as much to recommend it.
Jeff lit a cigarette, slipped out of the lodge and moved off through the woods toward the lake. There were cars approaching, and that meant luggage for bellhops to carry. It meant a tip or two, maybe, but he wasn't having any. Let Tim go all gung ho if he wanted to. Tim was the hustling type, sure that he could get rich by playing up to the cruddy guests and wheedling two bits here and a dollar there. Hell, maybe you could get rich that way-but it was a little too much like work to get Jeff excited.
There had to be an easier way.
He made his way to the lakeshore, finished the cigarette, pitched it into the water. The two fishermen were off to the left, hitting the bottle and drowning their worms in Lake Champlain. He wondered if they would catch anything. The boys in the kitchen half wanted them to and half didn't. Any fish they caught would mean extra work for the kitchen staff, since the damn fools would undoubtedly want to eat what they caught. But most fishermen tipped the chef when he cooked their rotten fish especially for them, it meant more money even though it meant more work.
God, the way you had to kiss rears to get a buck ahead of the game! He bent down, picked up a small flat stone and sent it skimming over the lake's surface. It made three hops, then sank. He took another stone, slightly larger, and got four hops out of it. He kicked a few stones into the lake, started to light another cigarette, changed his mind, returned the cigarette to the pack and sat down heavily by the edge of the water.
There had to be an easier way to scratch up some money. That was all he needed-a quick and easy way to make some dough, say a thousand bucks clear at the end of the season. He had already pretty much ruled out the idea of going back to school-any school-and he had also pretty much decided against the idea of living at home and pretending to be a scummy little devoted son. But what did that leave? A lot of nothing, a lot of back-breaking mindless work somewhere, a lot of work and a lot of sweat.
Unless he had some dough, in which case things could shape up differently. There was a guy in Dayton, a fence who had bought some of the junk that Jeff had stolen from the Science Building. The fence had a lot of things going, had connections all over Central Ohio. According to the fence, a guy with a little money working for him and a little connections on his side could write his own ticket. There was always a spot open for a sharp boy with a little sharp money. A racket in Newport, for example. A numbers district in Cleveland or Dayton or Columbus. Plenty of openings-all you needed was a little knowledge and a little bread.
A grand would do it, moneywise. And the fence would give Jeff the all-important foot-in-the-door. He had taken a shine to Jeff, had said that he liked Jeff's style.
If we only had a lousy little grand, he thought, we could be a millionaire.
He was throwing another cigarette in the lake when he heard footsteps on the path behind him. He turned around slowly, eyes wary. It was the Turner broad, a cigarette in one hand and a blanket over the other arm. She was wearing opaque sunglasses and a one-piece bathing suit.
He said: "Hello, Mrs. Turner."
"Hello," she said. "Nice day, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh. The sun's getting pretty strong."
"I think I'll catch a little of k. Would you help me get this blanket spread?"
He helped her with the blanket. The shore was covered with pebbles-the brochures neglected to mention the utter absence of sand while extolling the virtues of Cadbury's Lodge's private beach. She tossed her cigarette away and stretched out on the blanket, her purse at her side. He looked at her, then looked away, then looked at her again.
She wasn't bad. Not beautiful, but not bad either. The three little typists from New York had a tough and grubby air about them, but the Turner broad had something that approached class. And she wasn't built bad, either. Her legs, very pale white and sure to get a bad burn from the sun, were fine. And the bathing suit didn't hide the fact that she had a pretty good rear end.
She also had a husband to service her.
"Well," he said, "I'd better get back to the lodge. Don't fall asleep or anything. That sun can hit you hard the first time you get under it."
He started to go. Her voice stopped him.
"I don't know your name," she said.
"It's Jeff."
"Jeff. Listen, want to be an angel?"
"What?"
"There's a bottle of sun oil m my bag. It's guaranteed to make me tan instead of bum. I think all it does is fry you in deep fat, but I might as well try it. Could you oil me?"
Man, he thought, could I ever. He told her he'd be glad to, went to the bag, opened it, found the bottle of sun-tan oil in among an assortment of cosmetics.
"Do the neck and shoulders," she said.
He uncapped the bottle and let a little of the oil ooze into the palm of his hand. At first it was hard to touch her. He didn't know why. Then he managed to put his hand on the back of her neck and work the oil into her skin. Her skin was very soft. He felt himself warming, reacting to the closeness and softness of her.
Cool it, he told himself angrily. This is a married one, a class witch who just wants her back oiled. Or who just wants a cheap thrill with no main event afterward. Don't let her get to you, Jeff boy. Don't get your rocks in an uproar, because it isn't going to do you any good. Just do a good job oiling the chick and maybe she'll give you a quarter for your troubles.
"That feels good," she said.
She said it throatily, breathed it out at him. God, he thought, it's getting to her. It's actually getting to her. "You'd better do my legs," she said. "Uh-"
"So they don't burn," she said.
He did her legs. He started low, at the ankles, and he worked his way up along the ivory flesh to the tops of her thighs. He was breathing hard now, unable to keep cool, unable to force himself to remember that this was somebody's wife, that she just wanted a cheap thrill, that nothing on earth was going to make her put out.
And then, suddenly, she was saying: "Take my suit off, Jeff."
It zipped down the back. He opened it and pulled it down over her legs. He took it off and put his hands on her back, on her rear. He moved his hands around her back and toyed with her firm breasts. She still lay on her belly.
She didn't move or squirm, but it was obvious that she was hot to go.
He got his pants off.
"My husband and I don't get along," she said. "The marriage is all over. You understand, don't you?" He didn't say anything.
"Do it," she said. "God, this is wonderful, I need it. God, put it in me, do it to me-"
He started to turn her over onto her back. She shook her head determinedly. "No," she said. "No, do it this way, from the back, do it like this, like animals. I want to feel like an animal, like a randy old witch in heat. Do it."
He put his hands on her hips and lifted. She was kneeling slightly, her rounded bottom raised toward him. He moved her thighs and aimed himself at her, moved, touched her. He probed gently, and she sighed and shuddered and opened up to him, and he entered into the soft sweetness of her and felt her whole body shake with passion.
More.
More.
It was wild, weird. It was basic and animalistic. He made love to her without seeing her face, her breasts, just pounded away at her and gloried in the way her good womanly body shook and sobbed with the sweet agony of their desire. She did not move much. She knelt there, receiving him, and be gave her what she wanted, pitting his savage maleness against her receptive passive femininity. At first he thought it would end too quickly for him, that he would not be able to bring her all the way through. But then, near the end, she began to make wild little sounds, and when it ended it ended for both of them at once, and she shook and moaned and fell away from him and lay utterly still.
He covered her with part of the blanket and tucked the suit under the blanket with her. He waited until he was sure she was sound asleep and not likely to awake. He capped the bottle of suntan oil and put it back in her purse, and at the same time he took a twenty dollar bill from her purse and tucked into his wallet. It wouldn't be missed-if it was, she wouldn't mind. He had given her twenty dollars worth. Easily.
He smiled, lit a cigarette. Then he pulled up his pants and headed back to the lodge, whistling softly to himself.
From now until five o'clock, Kathy Mills had very little to do. Officially, she was a waitress. Three meals a day were served at Cadbury's Lodge, and she had to be on hand to do the serving for those three meals. She was supposed to be on her own the rest of the time, but it rarely worked that way, according to the other waitress who was spending her second summer at Cadbury's. There were always little things to do, bedmaking to assist in, minor cleaning jobs, none of which you were technically required to do but which you always found yourself doing anyway.
Now, though, there was nothing. She was on the porch with a book in her hand and a cold bottle of Coke at her elbow, sipping the Coke without quite tasting it and turning the. pages of the book without paying much attention to what she was reading.
The noon meal had been something of a fiasco. The main course was chicken salad, only the chef had not planned for that many pre-noon arrivals and had not had enough cold chicken on hand. He had thinned the mixture with tuna, on the theory that a little tuna in a lot of chicken tasted just like chicken. It didn't, really, and the guests who had swallowed the line in the brochure about gourmet cuisine were a little disappointed.
Well, the hell with the noon meal. The hell with the whole world, as far as that went. Kathy didn't really care about the meals, or about anything else connected with Cadbury's Lodge. What she was primarily interested in, at the moment, was sex.
And sex was a tough commodity to come by.
Not if you were normal, of course. There were those two horny-looking fishermen, both of whom had given her to understand, subtly but not too subtly, that she would be a welcome addition to their party, and that a little tumble with a girl like her would be a suitable facet of their manly week away from their wives. There were the bellhops and the kitchen staff and the rest of the lodge crew, most of them seemed quite willing to take her for midnight strolls as a prelude to midnight revues.
If you were queer for girls, though, it got tricky.
The typists, the trio from New York, were not promising. Mrs. Yarrow and Mrs. Turner were obviously out. And the girls on the staff-
It was funny. There was one girl on the staff who genuinely appealed, and that girl was Mary Lou Timmel, and Mary Lou Timmel was not a dyke at all. On the contrary, she seemed to be a bit of a nymph. As far as Kathy could tell, Mary Lou Timmel would put out for anything in pants.
Which didn't help at all. Still-
It was a funny thing, all right. You could never tell about girls like that. There were various classes of girls, some of whom might qualify as potential lesbians and some of whom would not. The virgins were always possibilities-if they were sufficiently scared of sex with men, they might be willing to try a girl on for size-or they might have been latent dykes all along. The ones who had a little experience with men were rarely suitable. If they liked it with men, but weren't absolute nymphs about it, they didn't seem like much in the way of dyke prospects.
But nymphs-well, that was something else again. Sometimes they were not basically hooked on men. Actually, they were hooked on sex, and that was different. If a girl was just plain hooked on sex, and if she didn't have too many unconscious prejudices against having a go at it with another girl, and if you put the proposition across in a suitably clever manner, and if you worked it up nicely, then you had a damned good chance of scoring. Mary Lou Timmel.
Yes, she thought, there was a chance. And, by God, it was a chance worth taking. The girl had an incredible body and two of the choicest breasts Kathy had ever seen in her life. And breasts meant a lot to Kathy. Mary Lou was really getting to her lately, walking around with those fine boobs jutting out all over the place, making her think what it would be like to touch, to hold, to stroke, to kiss, to lick, to suck-
Easy, she told herself. Easy.
She stood up, closed the book and set it down on the sagging sofa, left the Coke where it was. Mary Lou's official position was that of chambermaid, but with any luck at all she would be free now. There were no beds to make. So there were two possibilities-either Mary Lou was alone in her room, or else Mary Lou was getting boffed by some male.
As it turned out, Mary Lou was alone m her room. She opened the door when Kathy knocked, then stepped back and asked Kathy what she wanted.
"Nothing special," she said. "I just had time on my hands. "I could use company," she said. "Come on in."
She stepped inside and closed the door. She sat on a chair while Mary Lou sprawled on her bed. It was hard to take it easy now. The girl was lying on the bed, her big breasts bulging in her tight blouse, and it was all too easy to undress her mentally, to picture her nude on that bed. to imagine the feel of her silky flesh-
They talked. About the lodge, about the people, about everything, on and on. It was pleasant, although Mary Lou was too innately stupid to be much of a conversationalist. It was pleasant because she gradually felt an enlarging sense of intimacy with the girl. That was a necessary prelude. When you were dealing with a girl who was already a dedicated dyke, you didn't have to be friends. You just had to let her know what you wanted. But when you were trying to initiate a girl into the world's oldest sorority, you needed a firm basis of friendship first.
What Kathy really wanted, though, was to turn the conversation to sex. This wasn't easy. She was a little afraid, a little concerned that she might be too obvious.
Mary Lou did it for her.
"That new bellhop is cute," she said. "That Jeff Baylor. Did you meet him yet?"
"Briefly."
"He looks like he'd be a terrific stud," Mary Lou said. "Oh?"
"I think so."
"Are you interested?"
"I'm always interested." The big-breasted girl winked wickedly. "I'm not a very moral person," she said. "I like sex-that's all. I like all I can get of it."
"Well, there's nothing wrong with that."
"You don't disapprove?"
"I think everyone should do whatever makes them happiest," Kathy said carefully. "What do you like most about it?"
"About what?"
"Sex."
"Are you kidding?"
"No. Different people like different things."
"I like everything. I like the way it makes me feel. The sensations. I guess I'm a nympho, but I read that nymphos don't have orgasms. I do."
"Always?"
"Always. And I love having orgasms."
Kathy looked at her watch. "Listen," she said, "I've got to get going. But we ought to get together and talk some more."
"About sex?"
"Well-"
"We shouldn't," Mary Lou said. "You know, just talking about it makes me eager, Kathy."
She left quickly. Oh, brother, she thought. This one wasn't going to be so hard after all. This one was going to be easy. Such frank hedonism-oh, brother.
As she walked down the hallway, she unconsciously licked her lips with her long pink hungry tongue.
CHAPTER THREE
After lunch-which had been nothing to get ecstatic about-Charles Turner want back to his room. He waited quietly while Lydia changed to her bathing suit and draped a blanket over her arm. He thought she might ask him to go swimming with her, in which case he would have had the pleasure of refusing, but she didn't even ask, just went off without a word and left him there. He brooded over this for a few moments.
Then he got the bottle from his suitcase. The bottle was a fifth of J & B Scotch. It was unopened. Charles Turner looked at it for a moment or two, admiring the pretty green glass of the bottle, the red trim, the revenue stamp. Then, with skill born of frequent practice, he slit the seal with a thumbnail and opened the bottle and poured about three ounces of Scotch into a water tumbler. He studied the liquid, noting with approval the attractive color of it, sniffing the delicate bouquet.
Then he drank it-
The liquor helped a little. He poured another drink and sat down in an ancient arm chair. He looked out the window at a stand of trees and wondered what kind of trees they were. He did not know very much about trees, but he was glad to see them there, whatever variety they might be.
It was a damned good thing he had brought the liquor, he told himself. Because the only way they were going to get through this vacation-if they got through it at all, that is-was if he stayed slightly squiffed for the duration of the trip. The vacation itself was obviously ill-conceived. Whenever people tried to save their marriage, it was obvious that they were wasting their time. Good marriages didn't need saving, and bad marriages didn't deserve saving, and if there was a middle ground he didn't know about it-
His marriage was a bad one. All the way bad, with no redeeming features. It was hard to pinpoint the spot where it had gone sour, but wherever it had been it had been a permanent turn for the worse, and the movement toward marital disintegration and genuine divorce seemed to be irreversible. The standard assumption that marriage had to be saved had conned him into this attempt at a vacation, but already he and Lydia both knew what an absurd idea it was.
So they would just avoid each other as much as possible. It was easy enough to predict Lydia's behavior. Whenever things went maritally WTong, she went out and got some faceless man to take her. It was her inevitable reaction. Right now, he thought, she was either under some young stallion or looking around for a stallion to get under.
It never failed. She didn't do it because she wanted it, exactly, but because it was a way for her to get back at him, however foolish and futile it might be. And, strangely enough, it never failed to get to him Even now, knowing that he was going to be divorced from her before long, even though he felt no love for her and expected no love from her, the mental image of her fine warm body twisting and straining under some young louse was enough to make him see red. Why?
No man likes to play the cuckold, he thought. No man likes to be fitted for a pair of horns. And no man likes the idea of having some other young buck wallowing in his own private stamping grounds. Love-or the lack of it-has little to do with it. A husband can be possessive long after love has flown out the window.
He drank more Scotch. Two weeks of this, he thought. Two unending weeks of this-although it was probable that it wouldn't last two weeks, that sometime before that they would both decide they couldn't stand it any longer, and would promptly run back home and call their separate lawyers for a final split. But no matter how long they stayed here, it was going to be a trial.
And she wouldn't let him make her, either. Hell, even if they weren't in love, they were husband and wife. Even if they didn't care for each other, they still both had desires that had to be taken care of. But this didn't cut any ice with Lydia. In a sense, he thought, she was probably more moral than he was. She wouldn't make love with him unless she loved him. He was willing to take her anytime he was in the mood, whether he loved her or not.
He couldn't boff her.
Which meant he would have to boff somebody else.
Which was crazy. Really crazy. You take a husband and wife, and you stick them in a little resort out on Lake Champlain with hardly anyone else around, and you have both of them going off and banging other people, and you've got something crazy going for you. It was really crazy.
He raised the glass, started to take another drink, and discovered that the glass was empty. But the bottle wasn't.
He poured out some more Scotch and drank off most of it in the first swallow. Adultery.
Lydia liked to blame his adultery for the gradual disintegration of their marriage. You could make a good case that way, but he himself knew damned well that her theory was wrong all the way. The marriage went stale before that. Otherwise he never would have started banging Vera. Vera was just a secretary, a nicely stacked little secretary with wild yellow hair and a great body-but he would never had made a pass at her without a stale marriage to egg him on.
He remembered the first time. Broad daylight in the office, with Vera typing up a letter while he went over some old correspondence out of the files. He looked at her, and she was wearing one of those sweaters, the kind that hugged her boobs like a coat of paint. She never wore bras, either, and he had been able to see the outlines of those rosebud nipples pushing against cashmere, and-
And he had put his hands on her shoulders, gently, and when she didn't start in surprise or shrug him away he had gotten a little bolder, tipping back her head and kissing her on the mouth. At first she just received the kiss, neither fighting him nor helping him, her lips cool and her eyes open. But when he went on kissing her, and when one of his hands cupped the warmth of her swelling breast and pressed gently, then her eyes closed and her lips parted and her tongue snaked out hungrily and they both went a little bit crazy.
"Oh, God," she had said, tossing her arms around him, flattening her swollen breasts against his chest. "Oh, sweet Lord." she had moaned, standing up now, her arms around him. her hips swaying savagely against him.
She tried to stop it. She got frightened, and she pulled away, and she tried to get him to keep his hands to himself and stop feeling her up like crazy. But he didn't stop, and he knew that she didn't really want him to stop. He kept pawing at her, grabbing her, chasing her, and the more he did this the less she tried to make him stop. Until finally he backed her up against the desk and got a hand up under her skirt and caught hold of her.
"Go on," he had said, sure of himself now. "Tell me you don't want it. Tell me you don't ache for it."
And then she sagged against the desk, swaying weakly while he put both hands under her skirt and tugged her panties off and let them drop to the floor where they were bunched around her ankles. She didn't even bother to kick them off. He lifted her skirt and dropped his own clothing and she leaned back against the desk with her knees bent a little and he moved close to her and took her until she screamed and cried with passion.
She had been great. The affair went on for almost five months, and she had been great. At first he had wanted to set her up in an apartment but she had vetoed that, had said it would make her feel like a whore. He compromised by installing a big couch in the office, and hardly a day went by without him tossing her on that couch and boffins her until she went white and screamed from it. He loved it when she screamed with passion. It made him feel like a man, like a stud, like a bull.
And she was good.
God, she was good.
She would do things some girls wouldn't do. things Lydia wouldn't hear of. They were things he taught her, too. At first all she knew was the plain old-fashioned way, but he taught her French tricks and Greek tricks and she took to them like a duck to water, adding new little inventions of her own and going wild whenever he came up with an innovation. He remembered one time, one really wonderful time, when he sat behind his desk and talked to Lydia on the phone for fifteen minutes, explaining very carefully why he wouldn't be able to come home until late that night. And all the while, all the wonderful while, Vera was kneeling on the floor under his desk, her cheeks cool against him, her lips working with a delicious fury.
That was what he needed, what he needed in the worst way. A girl like Vera, a girl who just plain loved it, who always wanted it, who would do it whatever way he wanted to. A nice passionate and undemanding thing who would make him feel like a man again.
Fat chance finding something like that at Cadbury's Lodge, he thought. Not one chance in hell.
He poured more Scotch. The level of liquid in the bottle of J & W went steadily down. He went right on drinking until the liquor took hold completely. Then he collapsed on the bed and closed his eyes and passed out.
Ora Cadbury was not exactly disappointed. One couple with reservations had not arrived, which was a shame, but two fishermen without reservations had arrived, which made up for them, and things seemed to be working out nicely enough. The chef had been properly bawled out for screwing up the chicken salad with tunafish, and his pride seemed sufficiently injured so that he would go all-out for dinner, which was supposed to consist of lobster newburgh on a bed of rice, clam chowder, and other piscatorial delicacies. The fish would or would not be a bad idea, depending upon the temperament of the two fishermen-they had gone biteless that afternoon, and would either be glad for a chance to eat fish anyway or annoyed that they were having their noses rubbed in their failure.
But this didn't worry Ora. No, all in all, she was fairly well pleased with things. The honeymooning Yarrows seemed to have made a magnificent sexual adjustment, which meant that they would tell ail their friends that Cadbury's Lodge was a heavenly place for a honeymoon. The three girls from New York, with any sort of luck at all, would get made within a day or so by the bellhops and the kitchen staff. The Turners, who had evidently come to drink, would stay drunk for two weeks or more. The Fallons and the Devereauxs, who had come as a group, would sit around the lodge for two weeks playing bridge and drinking, and neither bad weather nor improper service would matter a great deal to them as long as there were fresh bottles and fresh decks of cards were on hand.
Ora rocked in her rocking chair. Unless she was losing her touch, the Fallons and the Devereauxs were doing more than playing bridge. She wasn't dead certain yet, but she had a good idea that they were also trading wives off and on. Ora had seen Phil Fallon pinch Betty Devereaux's little rear, and the way Jack Devereaux had studied Sue Fallon's breasts (while she in turn had her eyes on the front of his pants) could only be described as lecherous.
Well, fine. A little wife-swapping never hurt a resort. It gave the guests a good time. Furthermore, couples who played switchie games had lots of friends, and their friend played the same games. And their friends needed resorts to go to, and they would prefer resorts where you could do bizarre sexual things without getting evil stares, and-
God, she thought. Pretty soon I'll list wife-swapping in the brochure under Placid Pastimes in Shady Vermont.
She laughed heartily, rocked in her rocker, and drew on her cigarette Why, years ago she had been a hooker in a Newport eathouse and the madam had run the place on the pretense that it was a rooming house. And now she was running a hotel, all right, and she was trying to get it a reputation as a whorehouse. Things never changed, she thought. No matter what business you were in, you were still peddling carrots and doughnuts, no matter how you tried to package them.
She looked up when Lacie Marmon walked out onto the porch. "Well, hello," she said to the girl. "Enjoying yourself?"
"Oh, yes."
"The weather's really heavenly here. Blue skies, cool breezes. It makes a person want to spend the whole day just doing nothing."
"It certainly is peaceful," Lacie said.
Ora's eyes narrowed. Peaceful? Or boring? She wondered what the girl was looking for. Probably the same thing all girls were looking for, she decided.
"Uh ... did you want something?" Ora asked.
"What kind of-uh-activities, I mean, do you have here in the evenings?"
Sure, Ora thought. The girl was not looking for peace and quiet. The poor thing probably stayed cooped up all the time in New York, and what she really needed in the worst way was a boffing. Activities?
"We don't schedule formal activities at Cadbury's," she said carefully. "As a matter-of-fact, most of the time formal activities fall flat in a place like this. Maybe it's the mood, or something, but people seem, well, romantic up here. Whenever we used to try to start an activity the boys would nuzzle around the girls and wander off in the woods and the activity would just sort of fall apart."
She watched the anticipatory glow flood the girl's face. She went on talking, then excused herself and walked through the lodge to the kitchen. One of the boys-Kenny, a sailor type-was leaning against the sink eating ripe olives from a can. He put the can down guiltily when he saw her. She pretended not to have noticed.
"Kenny," she said sweetly, "there's a girl I think you ought to meet tonight. Her name is Lacie Marmon. She's one of the three girls from New York."
"Which one?"
"Tall, thin, big nose, big knockers. Notice her?"
"Mmmm."
"I think she might feel bored without male companionship, Kenny. I wouldn't want her to be unhappy here."
Kenny considered, then picked up the can and began eating olives again. "Well," he said.
"Do you know what I mean?"
"I got an idea. I had something on the line, Mrs. Cadbury."
"A guest?"
"Not exactly."
"Then you'll have to change your plans. Won't you?"
He sighed. A big, good-natured, very physical guy, she thought. One she wouldn't mind having herself. Not as smart as the Baylor kid and not as shrewd, but probably good in the rack. And easy as hell to control.
"Look, Mrs. Cadbury," he said, "long as you're calling the shots, what do you figure this babe wants?"
She looked at him.
"I mean, a kiss or a feel or the whole bit?"
Lord, he was direct enough. "The whole bit," she said, using his phrase. And then, winking: "I think she wants someone to bang her eyes out, Kenny."
"Will do," he said. "Will do."
"Oh, Lord," Sue Fallon said. "Who dealt this mess?"
"I did," her husband, Phil, said. "Pass."
"Club," Jack Devereaux, said, patting Sue's knee. "I pass,' Sue said.
"A diamond," Betty Devereaux said. Phil Fallon had his hand on her knee. She took hold of his hand, raised her skirt a little, and put the hand on her bare thigh.
"Pass."
"Two clubs," Jack said. He said this not to his partner but to Sue Fallons breasts. Two bazooms, he thought. I bid two bazooms, and I bid 'em all the way.
"Pass." Sue said. She remembered the last time she and Jack had been paired off. He was good, she remembered. But the way he liked best had hurt her a little. Strange enough, she enjoyed it when he hurt her like that. She took a deep breath so that her breasts would show up better.
"Two hearts," Betty Devereaux said. She moved Phil Fallon's hand a little higher up, and he moved it still higher, and she snapped her thighs together and imprisoned his hand. But the hand kept working, moving closer to its goal. Betty wished they would finish the game. She wanted more than a hand
"Pass."
"Two no."
"Pass."
"Three no."
The contract, at three no trump, made easily. The Fallons helped it along, anxious to end the rubber and get down to bigger and better things. Ideally the Devereauxs would have made three no trump on the nose, but the help of the Fallons gave it to them with an overtrick. Jack Devereaux stretched, said: "That's the rubber," and added up the score.
"I think I'm going upstairs to wash up," Betty said, as casually as possible. "Anybody else?"
The pretense was dropped once they got to the top of the stairs. Jack Devereaux hustled Sue Fallon into one room and Phil Fallon hustled Betty Devereaux into another. Doors closed. Clothes came off. Light went out Shades were drawn.
"Just think," Betty whispered. "On the other side of that wall, my husband is getting into your wife."
"Uh-huh."
"I wish we could watch."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"You don't want to watch. Haven't I got enough to keep you busy, honey?"
"You've got plenty."
"Then come here."
"Ooooh!"
"Yeah. You like?"
"I like."
"And this?"
"Jesus, yes. Oh. Oooh!"
"You're good, baby."
"Better than Sue?"
"To hell with comparisons. You're just great."
"My tits aren't as big."
"I know."
"Do you care?"
"No. It all evens out. You're nicer down here."
"Am I?"
"Yeah."
"How?"
"A snugger fit. Hey, you like this, baby?"
"Oh, Lord," Betty Devereaux said.
"Just think," Sue Fallon said. "On the other side of mat wall, my husband is getting into your wife."
"So?"
"I don't know. Doesn't it make you jealous? I mean, the idea of another man doing it to Betty."
"Hell. I don't care. If she's getting her kicks, that's tine with me. I've got some choice company myself."
"Meaning me?"
"Meaning you."
"What's choice about me?"
"Guess."
"Ow. It hurts when you squeeze them like that."
"That's cause they're too big for my hands."
"They're sensitive, too. They're the most sensitive things in the world. Just touching them drives me crazy."
"Like this?"
"God, yes."
"How about this?"
"Wheeee!"
"Hey," Jack said. "I've got an idea. Move down a little, baby. Now let's see how this works."
"Oh, Lord. Between them?"
"It's the only way with a girl like you."
"God, that feels good. Gee, I wonder what Betty and Phil are doing right now."
"Just concentrate on what we're doing, kitten."
"I just wondered."
"As a matter-of-fact, she's probably at his feet."
He shook and shivered and sighed. Then he rolled away from her and grinned. "You better wipe your face," he said. "We got a little bit carried away."
Mary Lou Timmel felt funny.
It was a hard feeling to pin down, and she didn't really understand it herself. It wasn't just a matter of feeling passionate-which was something she felt just about all the time unless she was with a man and doing it. It was something else, something very weird. And it had started when Kathy Mills had come into her room. What was it?
She wasn't quite certain. Maybe, she thought, it was just that she really wasn't used to talking to other girls. She wasn't the kind of girl who had a lot of female friends, naturally enough. When girls found out that you went to bed with loads of boys all the time, they somehow stopped liking you.
She wasn't sure why that was, exactly. There were a whole batch of reasons, as far as she could see. Some girls were prudes, and they thought going to bed with boys was sinful, and so they didn't like her because she was sinful.
And other girls wanted to do it with boys but were scared, and they were jealous of her. They wanted to do what she did, but they couldn't bring themselves to just go ahead and do it, so they made up for it by hating her.
So she didn't have many girl friends, and she wasn't used to talking with girls. Especially the way she had talked to Kathy. Why, they had really gotten to talking about sex, all right. She had done most of the talking and Kathy had done most of the listening, but Kathy had never seemed to be shocked by anything she had said. That was odd. too, because Kathy certainly didn't impress her as a girl who had been around.
And yet-
It was funny. Why, she remembered talking to Kenny about Kathy. "A good-looker," he said. "But I wouldn't go near that one with a ten-foot pole."
"Don't flatter yourself," she had said.
He laughed. "Well, you know what I mean."
"Why?"
"I just figure she's cold."
"How can you tell?"
"A guy can tell."
"Always?"
"Well, most of the time."
"And you think she's cold?"
"Baby," he said, "she's an iceberg. And what do I want with an iceberg when I've got a nice hot mama like you?"
At that point, naturally, they had stopped talking. They had had better things to do, the sort of things that outrank talking by a mile, and that was the end of their conversation about Kathy Mills.
But she was thinking about Kathy now. It was hard for her to understand a frigid girl, since she was so many eons removed from frigidity herself that the whole concept was not an easy one for her to comprehend. But she still couldn't manage to think of Kathy as frigid. Frigidity suggested or implied actual coldness in addition to sexual coldness, and she couldn't help thinking of Kathy as an essentially warm person.
So-
Maybe she was just inexperienced, Mary Lou decided. Maybe she was a virgin who had always been a little scared of sex, and now she was getting ready to take the big plunge, and she sort of wanted moral support. Or immoral support, actually. That was a good one-she was working up the courage to get herself boffed and stop being a virgin, so what she really wanted was immoral support.
Mary Lou giggled.
Well, she thought, she would have to help Kathy out. As far as she could see, there was nothing more pathetic on all earth than virginity. Why, sex was just about the sweetest thing in the world, and it was a whole scene that a virgin missed out on. Sex was great-it didn't cost you anything and you didn't need elaborate equipment and you could have it anytime anywhere just as long as you had a man around to take care of you. It was better than checkers or card games, certainly. It was better than any game in the world, because in other games one person lost and the other person won, and in sex, if you were good at it, both players won.
Which was great.
Really great.
Truly great.
Was that it, then? Kathy was just a virgin looking for help in her decision to make the big plunge?
That seemed to be it. But she wondered how a girl with Kathy's face and figure could manage to stay a virgin so long. She herself had lost her little old virginity at the unripe age of fourteen, which to be sure was a very early age for such a venture, but if Kathy was still a virgin it was phenomenal. She was certainly good to look at, all right. So the boys must have tried-
She sighed. It was time to go down for dinner, she thought. But she didn't feel like eating. Not food, anyway. But now she had to go down for dinner, and Kenny had said he wouldn't be able to be with her tonight because he had a date, and she didn't know who she would be able to press into service.
But she wasn't really worried. From the time she lost her virginity at age fourteen, it had never been very hard for Mary Lou Timmel to find a man who was aching to take her to bed. So this night would probably be no exception.
And maybe, she thought, maybe with luck she would be able to find a man for Kathy, too.
CHAPTER FOUR
For a short period of time during dinner it looked as though it was going to rain. It is strange perhaps that such a frequent phenomenon as rain, so necessary for the preservation of life, is greeted with such alarm by all persons connected in one way or another with the vacation industry. If it rains for a month in the winter in Florida, a dozen Miami Beach hotel managers swim off into the ocean and let the barracudas devour them. If it rains for a week in Los Angeles, the Chamber of Commerce refuses to comment on the situation when pressed by the press. And if it rains on any resort during the season, you aren't likely to hear shouts of joy from the operators of those resorts.
Strange, but true. A vacationer, perfectly accustomed to enduring deluge upon deluge in his own home sweet home, takes rain during a vacation as a personal insult. A stenographer who gets rained on with perfect equanimity three days out of seven in Jackson Heights turns green if it rains at Grossinger's. A mailman, whom neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay from the completion of his appointed rounds, has a fit if a minor league cloudburst puts an end to his vacation golf. And, if you tell a distraught resort owner that rain is good for the farmers, you are asking for a kick in the head.
So Ora Cadbury wasn't exactly tickled when it looked like rain. As a matter-of-fact, she became quite unable to eat. She pushed away her plate and stared glumly out the window, waiting for the waters to descend from the heavens.
If this happened, a lot of people would have their plans thwarted. Kenny could not take Lacie Marmon out into the woods and boff her, and they would have to confine their romancing to the lodge itself, which was too crowded to provide the proper illusion of woodland passion. The other girls, who were looking more for companionship and sweetness than actual sex, would not have the freedom of the great outdoors. The Devereauxs and the Fallons could still play their two games of bridge and wife-trading, of course, and the fishermen could sit up in their room getting drunk and preparing for another fine day of fishing on the morrow, and the honeymooning Yarrows could go to their room again. The two of them would go early to bed, and Mr. Yarrow would be early to rise, and after awhile they might even go to sleep.
So rain wouldn't be all that devastating, practically speaking. But people on vacation didn't want it to rain whether it interrupted their activities or not. Rain simply didn't fit the vacation mood, no matter how you looked a it.
Ora worried a little. She shouldn't have bothered. It didn't rain that night.
As a result, Kenny the kitchen boy took Lacie Marmon for a long and lazy walk by the side of the lake. They looked at the moon together, and he kissed her, and she grabbed at him frantically, and they sat together by the shore and handled one another furiously. She kept asking him to tell her he loved her, and he kept grabbing handfuls of her opulent breasts. Finally he told her that he loved her, and she said that he didn't but it was nice of him to say so, and she took off all her clothes and told him she needed it bad and to give her all he had. He did.
The two bellhops, Jeff and Tim, took the two other New York girls out for a rowboat ride. They rowed about a hundred yards down the lake, beached the boat, built a little campfire and sat around drinking from a bottle that Tim had thoughtfully brought along. Jeff wound up paired with Tillie, and Tim got Elsie. The couples spread out away from the campfire. Three hours later, Jeff and Tim took the girls back and compared notes. Tillie had just wanted to kiss a little and talk a lot, which had been fine with Jeff. Elsie had been ready for a little hand action but had shied away from the main event. Tim assured Jeff, though, that he would get into her within the next few days. "She's a pig," he said, "but I think she'll be passionate. She sure as hell knows the score, anyway. Give her a day or two and she'll go like a bunny."
Kathy Mills didn't do much of anything. She was fairly content with her progress in the Mary Lou Timmel campaign, but any further action in that area would have to wait awhile. No point in rushing things, she told herself. She sat around the lodge, having a bad moment or two when the chef wandered over and suggested that the two of them engage in some extraordinary perverted activity. She didn't know quite how to react, finally hitting on the happy solution of slapping his face and telling him he was a dirty old man. He grinned wickedly and went away, which was the general idea.
Mary Lou Timmel hitched a ride into Vergennes and went to a diner where she had a cup of coffee. At the diner she met a local farmhand. He was a brawny, slow-speaking man. He bought her a cup of coffee, then took her for a ride in his station wagon. In the back of it he banged her four times without getting short of breath. Then he drove her back to the lodge and she went to her room smiling.
Owen Cadbury got very drunk and threw up in the toilet.
Jack Devereaux approached both Yarrow and Turner, sounding each of them out on the possibility of their joining the little wife-swapping crew. The subtle hints sailed over the head of the honeymooning Yarrow, and Devereaux finally gave up, disgusted. Charles Turner assured him with a perfectly straight face that they couldn't possibly go for it because he was a homosexual and his wife Lydia was a lesbian, and besides, both he and his wife only enjoyed sexual activity that resulted in the death of their partner. Devereaux wasn't sure whether or not to believe him, but he didn't want to sit around thinking about it. The Devereauxs and the Fallons played a few rubbers of bridge, then retired together to the same room where one couple would copulate while the other watched.
Lydia Turner read a book. Charles Turner, who had a hell of a hangover, started to take a hair of the dog and wound up swallowing the whole dog. He got properly stoned and passed out again.
The Yarrows returned to their favorite indoor sport. They got a little carried away, and one of the springs in the bed broke, and they thought that was so funny that they laughed like hyenas, and then they finished up on the floor.
On Thursday, Jeff had the night off. In another day it would be a full week since he had come to work at Cadbury's Lodge, and it had been neither a bad week nor a particularly good week. His tips had totaled something like four dollars, plus the twenty dollars he had taken from Lydia Turner after balling her by the edge of the lake.
Aside from Lydia Turner, and one catch-as-catch-can tumble with nympish Mary Lou Timmel, the week had been sexually stagnant. Tillie the Toiler (his private name for her) was convinced he was in love with her, and that their romance would Lead to Something. He had neglected to tell her that he had been thrown out of college, or that he was younger than she was, or that he had no intentions of (a) becoming a doctor, or (b) marrying her.
Instead they took long walks together, sat around necking innocently, and otherwise passed the time. She thought she was playing hard to get and really giving him a sexual teasing; as a matter-of-fact, he was just damned glad she didn't feel like getting boffed, because he couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the task. Anyway, he told himself, she would pay for his time. In a day or two he would borrow ten or fifteen bucks from her, and he would never repay the loan, and she would forget to ask for it. Even so she would be getting the best of the bargain, but that was the way it went.
For the time being, though, to hell with Tillie the Toiler and all the other clowns at Cadbury's. He had the night off, and he wanted to make the most of it. He put on his dress slacks and a clean white short sleeved shirt with a button-down collar. He made a half-hearted stab at shining his shoes, then gave it up and hurried out of the Lodge to his car. Tillie, bless her, called to him and asked him where he was going.
"Got to take a run into town," he called back. "Take it easy, doll."
"You, too," she said imaginatively.
He got behind the wheel of the Chevy, stuck the key in the ignition, started the motor. For a moment or two he didn't think the engine was going to turn over. Hell, if you left a car sitting idle for six days you didn't get too much response from the engine. But the old Chevy picked up and went. He drove to the road, then worked his way back to Vergennes.
The town was quiet. Vermonters are a stolid breed of people, not given to a boisterous display. The population of the state, in the face of a. universal population explosion, has remained more or less constant for the past hundred years-which shows just another thing that Vermonters do not do to excess. There were only two promising bars in the town, neither of them all that promising, and both of them depending for their existence upon the out-of-state summer trade.
Jeff picked the classier one, a log cabin affair on 22A called, coyly enough, The Old Log Cabin. The bar was one of those purposely rustic places, with a sprinkling of sawdust on the floor, a batch of colonial artifacts nailed here and there on the walls, a barman with a leather apron, and porter and stout on tap, along with beer and ale and all of the current status-symbol whiskeys. Jeff looked around, measured the place briefly, then walked to the bar and took a seat. He ordered a glass of beer and nursed it.
He wasn't a drinker. Drinking dulled you, slowed you down. If you really tanked up you could do things and not remember them the next day. He didn't like that. When you lost memory that way, you could get yourself in big trouble and never know about it.
He didn't like losing control. Maybe that was good enough for an ordinary Joe, a straight shooter who plodded along without ever really knowing which end was up. But not Jeff Baylor-he wasn't that kind of person. He kept his eyes open, he looked for the angle, the break.
A nice stake-that was all he needed. A few good breaks and he would have his thou, and then he would pull a few strings and find the right way to put that thou to work for him, and then he would be home free. There was only one way to make money without working up too much of a sweat, and that was to have something going for you. You laid your own money and your own brains on the line and you lived on the dividends your brains and money earned for you.
But you needed a thou first. And that was the rub. With the stake he was set, and he would shop around and rind the right angle and the money would roll in, and there would be a plush apartment somewhere with a plush broad inside to warm his bed for him, and he'd trade the Chevy for a hot little T-Bird, and all would be cool.
But where in hell was he going to get a thousand bucks?
A couple of jobs, he thought. It seemed fairly obvious that he wasn't going to make the money honestly, but what kind of dishonest jobs would get it for him? Robbery was the first thought-hit a few service stations, clean them out for around a hundred bucks each, and just a few of them would do it, added to the few bucks he had and the money he could expect to earn at the lodge.
Robbery didn't set right with him. In a robbery you could get caught, or even shot, and people saw your face and you were begging for trouble. Even theft or burglary, which had worked so well at Clifton College, left something to be desired. The best method would be one in which the person you hit wouldn't put up a squawk. Or, even better, in which you didn't hit anyone.
Like gambling, or selling contraband, or something like that. For gambling you needed connections-even with no competition in the area, you were taking a big chance booking horse bets or anything like that. One good hit and you were through. You needed a bankroll, for one thing, and you needed connections so that you could lay off the heavy action that you weren't equipped to handle.
Contraband. Like what?
He could sell liquor to the guests, of course. But nobody ever got rich that way unless he was in a dry state, and Vermont was not dry. In a dry state or county you could sell a buck bottle of moonshine to a sucker for five bucks, but in a wet state the only money you made on liquor was your tip for running after it.
What else did the guests want that they couldn't get by themselves? Heroin? Now there was a business with a nice mark-up, but the crowd at the lodge didn't exactly impress him as a collection of junkies. Not by a long shot. The average summer visitor in Vermont is hardly characterized by a batch of tracks on his arms and legs.
Of course, the New York advertising crowd was all hot to try marijuana this year, according to what he had heard. And once the Madison Avenue gang got hold of something, the rest of the country picked it up a few months or years later. Still, it wasn't worth it. It would take him forever to find a source of supply, and it would take him almost as long to find customers, and the risks were just too damned great.
So what was left? What did the crew at the lodge want that they couldn't get?
Louse, he thought. It was obvious. They wanted sex.
Great ideas happen that way, you know. Archimedes doped out the principles of specific gravity while sitting in the tub, and wound up running naked through the streets shouting Eureka. Newton managed to plot out his laws of motion because an apple fell on him. And, just sitting in The Old Log Cabin and watching a beer evaporate. Jeff Baylor figured out just how he would earn that thousand dollars.
He would be a pimp.
It seemed so simple now that he thought about it. There were men at the lodge who wanted girls to boff-and he could provide the girls. There were girls who wanted men to bang them-and he could satisfy their needs, either singly or through other hands if need be. There were probably people with fairly exotic tastes, perverts of one variety or another, and abnormals would pay plenty to one Jeff Baylor in return for an ideal outlet for their sexual aberrations. There would probably be a few faggots in the course of the long hot summer, and a few bull dykes, and a few guys who wanted young girls, and a few couples who wanted to share a whore between them, and a few customers for dirty pictures, and some people happy to constitute an audience for a dirty movie, and-
The possibilities were endless.
Absolutely endless.
And the potential profit was staggering. Utterly staggering.
He got up from his stool, left half his beer unfinished. He didn't need the beer now. He didn't need anything, not for the time being, not a thing but a little peace and quiet so that he could figure out just how to get the operation rolling properly. Hell, he didn't have to confine operations to Cadbury's Lodge, either. A few well-placed words to a few well-placed bellhops at other resorts would expand his field of operations tremendously. Just let the hops know what to do whenever they got someone looking for fun. Just let them know they could call good old Jeff Baylor, could get a piece of whatever business they brought in, and the money would roll in from all sides. It couldn't miss.
A thousand dollars? Hell, with any sort of luck he could clear three times that in the course of the summer. And for a few minutes he had actually been thinking about gas station hold-ups-Jesus, it was amazing!
While Jeff was plotting, Kathy Mills was putting part of her plot into effect. While he was thinking, she was about to act.
She had waited quietly on the front porch while Mary Lou sort of circulated around the area, looking for an interested man. The interested men, however, seemed few and far between that night. And, after a long stretch of prowling, Mary Lou wound up on the porch, rocking industriously on the rocker and not hiding the fact that she was frustrated.
Fine, Kathy thought, ideal.
"Hi," she said brightly. "What's up?"
"Nothing," Mary Lou said. That's the whole trouble."
The hole trouble?"
"All puns intended," Mary Lou said. "Gee, I don't know. I mean, maybe there's something wrong with me, or something. I just get so horny."
"Not so loud, girl. Everybody can hear you."
"So what? Nobody's interested, Kathy."
She shook her head. "Honey," she said, "you're in a bad way, all right Listen-I've got some wine up in my room. What do you say we go up and have a couple of glasses? It's what you need to relax you."
"I need something else, Kathy."
"C'mon. We'll sit around and sip wine and talk and get a little bit tanked. Got anything better to do?"
"I guess not," Mary Lou said.
The wine in Kathy's room was a bottle of Beaujolais, not too warm and not too cold, and properly dry. Kathy poured out two water tumblers of it, gave one to Mary Lou and kept the other for herself. They clinked glasses ceremoniously and sipped at the wine. Mary Lou was wearing a tight sweater-her most frequent uniform-and it was getting to Kathy, driving her slightly crazy. The girl had a pair of the most massive breasts in creation and that was all there was to it. They were utterly huge. They were even larger than that Mrs. Fallon's, and she was stacked, and even so Mary Lou made her look positively small.
God-
"I just don't know," Mary Lou was saying. "Maybe you don't know, I mean, you haven't had that much experience-"
"I haven't?"
"Well, I-"
"I don't go crazy over it," Kathy said deliberately. "But I've been around a little, baby."
"You have?"
"Uh-huh."
"Doesn't it-doesn't it thrill you?"
"Men don't show me that much most of the time."
"How come?"
She took a breath. "Well," she said. "Well, Mary Lou, you see, they won't do it the best way, most of the time."
Mary Lou was looking at her strangely. "I don't understand."
"You know," Kathy said. "There's one way to make love that's nicer for a girl than any other, and most boys won't go for it."
"What way do you mean?"
"What do you think?"
"I don't know."
"I mean oral things."
Mary Lou looked at her. sipped more wine, and nodded thoughtfully. "Oh," she said slowly. "I thought-"
"What?"
"I thought that was probably what you meant."
"And?"
Mary Lou didn't say anything.
"Boys don't usually like to do that," Kathy said.
"I know."
"Did you ever-"
Mary Lou nodded slowly. "There was one boy I went with," she said. "Oh, a long time ago. He was lots older than me. He liked to ... well, to do it that way."
"You were lucky. Most of them don't."
"I know."
She lifted the bottle. "More wine?" She didn't wait for an answer but filled Mary Lou's glass to the brim, then added wine to her own glass. "Let's drink up," she said hopefully. "We can't have a wild conversation like this one if we're cold sober."
They drank. Now came the tricky part, Kathy thought. Now came the part where she had to get Mary so hot and bothered that she wouldn't draw the line at a little lesbian loving. This was the spot where Kathy had to be very cool and clever about the whole thing, but it was getting tough to be cool and clever.
Because she was getting far too warm herself.
She said: "Do you remember what it was like?"
"What?"
"When the boy did it to you."
"He wasn't really a boy. I guess he was a man. A lawyer."
"Well, do you remember?"
Mary Lou took a deep breath. It made her breasts jut out further than usual. "I remember."
"And?"
"It was ... wonderful."
"I'll bet you've wanted boys to do it since then, haven't you?"
"Yes, but they never want to. Why is that?" v "They're selfish," Kathy said firmly. "They're only interested in their own pleasure."
"You think that's what it is?"
"Of course."
Mary Lou considered it. "I guess you're right," she said. "I know they always want me to do it for them, but-"
She broke off suddenly, grinning. "Oh, this is silly," she said. "I mean, talking about that sort of thing, about people going down on people. Don't you know what it's doing to me?"
"What?"
"It's getting me all hot."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Everything. I'll get all hot and then I won't be able to do anything about it, and that's no good."
Kathy moved closer to the girl. She could almost feel the heat of the girl's luscious young flesh. "Maybe you will be able to do something about it," she said.
"What?"
"I said maybe-"
"I know what you said. But what do you mean?"
Oh, God! The girl wasn't quite drunk enough, and she had handled things too quickly, and ... well, she had to try. She was committed now, win or lose or draw. She had to give it that old college try, no matter what happened.
She said: "Maybe I could help you do something about it."
"I don't get it."
"Don't you?" She smiled gently. "Boys don't like to ... do it to girls, that way. But I wouldn't mind."
"Doing it to me?"
"That's right."
"Oh, but-"
And then she reached for the girl, drew her close. She could feel the delicious pressure of Mary Lou's huge mounds of breast-flesh against her own firm small breasts and desire shot through her lustful body like a sword tearing through a sheet of sheer silk. She gasped with the sweet agony of it.
"Let me," she whispered. "You don't have to do a thing, not a thing, all you have to do is let me make love to you. I won't hurt you, I won't do a thing you don't want me to do. Oh, I'll thrill you, Mary Lou. I'll make you feel wonderful, I swear I will, I'll make you feel like a queen-"
She did not wait for permission, knowing that verbal assent would be too much to hope for. Right now the only way to get Mary Lou to go along with her was to go right ahead and act. If the girl didn't stop her, then she was home free.
If only the girl didn't stop her.
Quickly, very quickly, she pushed Mary Lou back down onto the bed. "Now close your eyes," she whispered. "Just close your eyes, just relax, just dream. Just let me love you."
For a moment she thought the girl was going to speak. There were tension lines in Mary Lou's face, little lines that showed fear and apprehension. But the lines faded and the girl calmed down and Kathy knew everything was going to be all right.
Now.
Now-
She took off Mary Lou's skirt first, then her sweater. The girl was not wearing a bra-which seemed incredible, because who had ever hear of breasts that size getting along without support? But Mary Lou didn't need a bra, not at all. Even now, lying flat on her back, her huge breasts stood up free and proud and perfect. Kathy gasped at the sheer perfection of them.
Then the socks and shoes came off.
Then the panties.
She took off her own clothes hurriedly, stripped down at once and then lay on the bed beside Mary Lou. No kisses on the face, she reminded herself. That would only bring home to Mary Lou the fact that what they were doing was abnormal. Don't bring love or personal feeling into it at all, she told herself. Just make it one sexual joyride from beginning to end.
She started on Mary Lou's breasts.
At first she just used her hands. It took both hands to hold one of the huge breasts-they were that large. She touched them, tugged at the rosy perfection of Mary Lou's nipples. Her hands embraced the sweetness of the two breasts, and as her fingers moved with consumate skill she felt the tensions building within Mary Lou's body. Tensions of passion now, not of worry. Mary Lou was getting hot as a stove.
For several minutes she continued the gentle, careful caresses. Then her hands moved slowly down from the breasts, coursing over Mary Lou's slightly rounded stomach. And her lips, warm and moist, moved to take possession of the area her hands had left vacant.
Her mouth went wild on Mary Lou's ripe breasts. Her tongue, neat and nimble, drew a tiny circle around each nipple and dotted each circle with a flick of the tongue. Her lips kissed here and kissed there, planting a trail of tiny kisses that burned their way into Mary Lou's breasts like a branding iron into the hide of a steer. The girl was gasping now, her big breasts rising and falling with the fury of her ragged breathing. There was no worry from here on in, no worry at alL The girl couldn't stop if she wanted to. Mary Lou was too hot to quit and Kathy had it made.
And finally, slowly, her lips trailed off, moving down the valley between the two breasts, down across stomach, in and out of navel, over the belly to the sweet wonderland below. Kathy wasn't the schemer now, not any more. She was too carried away herself. The seduction had been accomplished gloriously and now, now, now, she was tasting the sweet fruits of victory.
They tasted devine.
Absolutely divine.
Heavenly.
Her hands were rigid talons that gripped the sweet meat of Mary Lou's thighs and held them apart. Her mouth was the mouth of a greedy, hungry child ou his mother's breast, sucking sweet nourishment from that magnificent organ. Her whole body glistened with sweat and quivered with lust, and she sought pleasure and gave pleasure, letting her entire body abandon itself to the delights of lustful flesh.
Faster and faster it went, higher and higher, deeper and deeper and wilder and wilder. The world was spinning now at top speed, racing back and forth between the sun and the moon, dipping and soaring and turning upside-down and inside-out. describing impossible circles and swaying and revolving and doing incredible things. And Mary Lou was a furious goddess heaving in the throes of passion. Venus submitting to Apollo and engulfing him, the eternal woman in the embrace of her eternal mate.
More.
More-
Till the whole world opened up and belched forth lava, and the sky turned black and white and black again, and Mary Lou moaned and Kathy moaned and everything, all at once, was very, very still and placid and silent.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lydia was in the shower. Charles Turner looked at the closed bathroom door-about half the rooms at Cadbury's had private bathrooms, not counting the employee's rooms, and the Turners had one of them. He looked at the door and listened to the water pounding down on Lydia's body, and then very deliberately he uncorked the bottle of j & B and poured out a double shot Needless to say, this was not the same bottle of J & B which he opened the first day at the lodge. It was the fifth bottle. Although Charles had not had enough to pass out on since that first day, he had at the same time been careful to avoid drawing a single wholly sober breath since then.
He drank the liquor, closed his eyes, listened to the drumming of the water. He could imagine Lydia now, under the shower spray, the steaming water lashing at her full body. He poured another drink and sipped at it.
Hell of a thing, he thought Perfect hell of a thing.
Here he was, cooped up in the middle of nowhere and horny for his own wife. And what good did it do him? No good at all. Lydia, his dearly unloved, was America's most frigid witch as far as he was concerned. He knew damn well she had been boffed at least once around the lodge, but the layer had not been him, and eager or not he seemed to be locked into a life of utter celibacy.
A life of utter celibacy is not natural. It is not truly natural for anyone, and it was not remotely natural for Charles Turner. Which is not to suggest that he was a satyr or a pervert or a superman or anything of the sort. He was a normal man. He didn't start to drool if he went a day or two without having a woman. He didn't stand on his head and kick his heels, either. And, if he didn't have a woman within a certain period of time, it got to him.
It was getting to him now.
In spades.
With bells on.
He lit a cigarette, his hand steady, his coordination unimpaired. There was still a little Scotch in his glass. He looked down at it, decided not to drink it. The shower stopped. His mind filled with a picture of Lydia's nude body emerging from the shower, warm from the hot water, glistening with moisture.
He drank the Scotch.
When the door opened and she came out wrapped in a nubby pink towel, with the tops of her breasts and the bottoms of her thighs showing, he couldn't stand it any longer. The hell, he thought, this witch was married to him. He had certain rights. If he wanted to make love to his own goddamn wife, it was his privilege. When the divorce went through she could play the vestial virgin all she wanted. For the time being, she was his property.
He said: "The switchers found another couple."
"The Fallons and the Devereauxs?"
"Uh-hnh. Just in time to keep things from going stale for them. A couple of people checked in. From Connecticut, I think. Somebody said something about Hartford. A couple of young kids. That Jack Devereaux was after them like a hawk, probably because of the hot little body of the Connecticut wife."
"And they went along with it?"
"Evidently. They're probably partying right now. I think that's all they ever do."
"That and play bridge."
She was drying her body now, and paying no attention to him, and it was maddening. He kept getting little peeks at the private parts of her lush female body. When she dried her breasts, rubbing them diligently with the towel, be started shaking
"I'll do that for you," he offered.
"Never mind."
"Devereaux wanted us to join their happy circle. I told him-"
"I know. You told me what you said."
"He didn't know whether or not to Lake me seriously."
"You told me."
"Lydia-"
She turned, looked at him. "What is it?"
"I want you," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want to. Isn't that simple enough?" He poured another shot and threw it down without tasting it "Listen," he said, "I'm only human."
"I never thought you'd admit it"
"And you're my wife."
"In name only."
"Doesn't make any damn difference. You're still my wife. Ii I want you I can have you. I haven't had a piece since we got here, damn it."
"That's your fault."
He got to his feet. "And you? I suppose you've been pure?"
"It's not any of your business."
"Rotten whore," he said. "She'll give out for the rest of the world but not for her own husband. Rotten witch."
He took a step toward her. She retreated, holding the towel in front of her in an attempt to cover her breasts and loins. He snatched at the towel, caught hold of it, tore it from her grasp. The sight of her bare body set him on fire. He kept moving closer to her and he took off his own clothing on the way. Then he was naked, too, and he had her backed into a corner and her eyes were wild with fear and anger in equal proportions. His heart pounded and his eyes drank in the sight of her, naked and desirable. And he was going to get her this time. Whether or not she gave in didn't make a damn bit of difference. If it had to be rape it would be rape-the hell with it, one way or another he was going to get into her.
"Don't," she said.
He came closer.
"All right," she said. "I warned you."
He reached for her. Her hands shot out and her nails raked his face. He fell back, wild, and her knee shot forward and drove into his groin.
He moaned like a girl. He clapped both hands to himself and doubled up in agony. The pain was like a sword. He closed his eyes and rolled around desperately on the floor while a thousand violins played Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite at top volume. He blacked out for a moment, then came to again, then gasped for breath as the pain gradually ebbed somewhat. At last he caught his breath.
She was standing there, looking at him. She was wearing clothes now. He told her that she was a rotten filthy whore and he was going to kill her.
"I didn't want to do that," she said. "You witch-"
"Charles," she said. "I ... I didn't want to do that. I warned you, you forced me to do it, I'm sorry." He didn't say anything. "I'm going out now," she said.
He didn't say anything. He watched while she opened the door and stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her. Then, slowly, he got to his feet and stroked the tender part of himself where her knee had had such a devastating effect.
The witch.
The rotten witch!
He was going cnuy, he thought. He was really going crazy. He was drinking too much and brooding too much and leching too much, and he had finally got to the point where he was trying to rape his wife, and he wasn't even succeeding. All he had gotten out of that little simpleminded episode had been a swift kick where it could do the most harm.
It was really crazy.
The sex part was getting in the way. What he needed, he thought, was a girl who would do anything you wanted without giving you a hard time. A whore, he thought. A nice rat-headed whore with a cashbox between her legs. You put your money on the line and the girl did what you wanted her to do and when she was done she went away and left you alone.
A whore.
And that was the cutest thing of all, by God. All he needed was a whore, and any man who could find a whore in the wilds of Vermont deserved a medal. At home it was easy-he called one of a dozen numbers that he knew by heart and a whore came over and took his money and gave value in return. Or, if all the lines were busy, a quick walk or drive down the right street would produce a harlot in minutes.
But here he was in Vermont.
Whoreless in Vermont. Hell, he thought, that sounded like a song title. Whoreless In Vermont, di dah dah di di di dah. He sang it softly to himself. Then he added words: Whoreless in Vermont, with a wife who is frigid-
How in hell, Charles Turner asked himself, did anyone find a whore in Vermont?
Jeff Baylor found three whores in Vermont in somewhat less than forty-eight hours.
It wasn't hard. That first night, when he had figured out just how to make his fortune, he went on a whore-hunt. The first step, naturally enough, was to ask around. He wondered around Vergennes and asked people where he could find a prostitute until someone told him that the only hooker in the area lived twelve miles away, in Middlebury. He drove there, found her, and signed her up.
Actually, it was almost that easy. The girl was about twenty-five, a very slender broad with ash-blonde hair and surprisingly large breasts. She lived in a three-room house on the edge of town and sold herself for three bucks a shot, which was nothing at all. Jeff told her she could make three times as much money if she threw in with him, and that she would have no worries about getting business, and that everything would be copasetic for both of them.
"What do you get?" she asked.
"Half."
She looked at him. "That sounds like a lot," she said. "Which is more-three bucks or half of ten?"
"Half of ten is five. I guess that's more."
"Good thinking," he told her. "You stick with me and you'll never turn a trick for less than ten bucks, which means a minimum of five for you. And there'll be plenty of fifteen and twenty-buck tricks, too. You'll be making more money for less boffing and you won't have to do any of the hustling. All of the tricks will be lined up in advance. You can't lose."
She grinned at that. "How come it's that simple?"
"Just like the labor unions," he told her. "You got to organize if you want to get the breaks. Stay on your own and you wind up out in the cold. That's all there is to it."
The whore's name was Linda. She knew another girl named Marge, a redhead with a fairly plump behind and two fairly plump knockers, and when Marge heard about the set-up she wanted in on it. Marge wasn't the most beautiful thing in the world, but she informed Jeff that there wasn't a thing in the world that a John could ask for that she wouldn't do. You couldn't argue with that sort of attitude. Jeff welcomed her to the club.
The next night, in Vergennes, he found the third girl.
The third one wasn't a professional when he found her. He went into town, stealing an hour or two from Cadbury's Lodge without worrying that he would be missed, on the chance that he might encounter some action of one sort or another. Even in hick towns in northern New England there is a certain amount going on, and if you're in the rackets you make it your business to know as much as possible about whatever is going on in your general vicinity. So he floated a little, keeping his eyes and his ears open. He floated into a coffee pot eventually, and that was where he found the girl.
She was waiting on customers. A knockout-brunette, lithe and lovely, about three inches more than five feet tall. Stacked, too, with good-sized knobs and a tiny waist and hips made to play horizontal games with. She saw the way his eyes played with her curves. When she brought him his coffee she leaned over the counter and ran her tongue over her lips.
"You like me?"
He could see down the front of her uniform. She was not wearing a bra and he could see the sweet meat of her bulging breasts. He felt a stirring of desire, something he had not experienced in a long time. With the women at Cadbury s Lodge he was just a boy with a job to do, and with Marge and Linda, Middlebury's two whores, it was just a matter of business.
This one he wanted.
"I like," he said.
"I get off in ten minutes. Got a car?"
"Sure."
"Car got a back seat?"
"Sure."
"Meet me."
"Sure."
He drank the coffee and went outside to sit in the car. Ten minutes later she was hurrying from the doorway to the car, her eyes bright He opened the door and she hopped in and curled up on the seat with her legs tucked underneath her twitching bottom. The top button of her blouse was open. She opened a second button and adjusted the blouse so that a lot of her breasts showed.
"My name's Sara."
"Jeff."
"Let's go somewhere." Sara said "Let's have an orgy."
He piloted the Chevy down a few winding country lanes. The sky was still fairly bright but he didn't particularly care. He pulled off the road and reached for her and she hopped into his arms like a bunny.
This, incidentally, was not the sole point of similarity between Sara and a rabbit. She did other things like a bunny as well.
This time she did them in the back seat of the Chevy.
He got her blouse off and her skirt up, and he piled her into the back seat, and he didn't even have to feel her up or caress her or kiss her to get her ready. She had been ready all along.
It was pretty great. Not only what she was doing, but the great effect it had on her. She really went crazy. Sex is a two-way street, of course, and you never have as much fun as when you think your partner is going through the roof too. And it was obvious to Jeff that Sara was going through the roof. She moaned and she groaned and she sobbed and she quivered, and at the end she went off like a bomb.
While he was sitting up and trying to get a cigarette loose, she said: "I didn't get there, you know."
She said it almost conversationally. He stared at her, thinking he was hearing wrong.
"I never do," she said. "I ... tend to fake things, kinda. Like I'm not really that passionate. I enjoy doing it, and all that, but it doesn't get me the way I pretend, really."
"It doesn't?"
"No."
"Then why do ft?"
"Cause it's kinda fun," Sara said. "I in cad, once i did it with four guys, one after the other, and it made them real happy, and it was kind of kicks, and-"
He took a deep breath. "Sara," he said slowly, "I know a way you can make a lot of money. Much better than being a waitress, and a lot more fun."
It took a little talking before she was entirely sold on the idea. First of all, she felt that good girls didn't become whores, and there was no arguing with that line. So he tried a different approach. He explained to her that, to begin with, she wasn't a good girl. She was a tramp, he told her, and if she was going to be a tramp she might as well cash in on it
"Well," she said brightly, "I guess."
Then she told him that the job as waitress gave her a guaranteed income, and she would be taking a risk if she quit. It turned out that she was making a hot little thirty-five bucks a week at the job-"before taxes."
"Listen," he told her, "you swing with me and I'll guarantee you that much a week. If you don't get a single call I'll pay you thirty-five bucks out of my own pocket. Fair enough?"
"Well," she said brightly, "I guess."
She had a few more questions, but they were ones that he could supply answers to, so there was no problem on that score. He made all the necessary arrangements, then got ready to drive her back home so that he could get back to the lodge.
She said: "Jeff, honey."
"What?"
"I was thinking. Maybe we could do it again?"
"Now?"
"Uh-huh. Sort of to seal our bargain or something."
He laughed. "Save it for the cash customers," he said. "It'd be like the fat guy who opened a restaurant. You know-always eating up all the profits."
"You don't have to eat-"
"Forget it," he said, grinning. "In a day or two you'll be getting all the gash you can handle."
He dropped her off, thinking what a wonderful find she had been. Sara was a natural whore-she enjoyed it but didn't feel a thing, and once her mercenary nature had a chance to develop a little more she would be perfect. He was doing fine, he told himself. Three hookers on the string already. In a day or so, he would start to rake in the bread.
Mary Lou finished making her last bed at a quarter to two. That gave her the rest of the afternoon pretty much to herself, except for the unwritten obligation to be around the lodge from four to five to help with whatever trivia might arise. In theory both of the chambermaids were supposed to be on hand all the time, in case a guest needed something done to his room in a hurry, or in case somebody checked out and somebody else wanted to check in right, away, or anything like that. But in practice the two girls alternated, one sticking close to the lodge and the other going for a swim.
She had just changed to her bathing suit when somebody knocked on the door. She called out, asked who it was. It was Kathy.
"Come in," she said.
Kathy came in, her eyes calm, her lips curled in a smile.
"Hello," she said. "Hi."
"Have you been avoiding me?"
"No. Why?"
"I don't know. I got that impression, though. You've been avoiding me ever since I made love to you." Mary Lou bit her lip. "Not on purpose."
"Oh."
"Because you're upset about what we did." Kathy shrugged, crossed the room and threw herself down on a chair. "That's what it is, isn't it?"
"I suppose so."
"Are you sorry about what happened?"
"Yes."
"I'm not." Kathy sighed. "I'm not, because I enjoyed it and I know you enjoyed it, too. Didn't you?"
"Yes."
"So what's the trouble?"
Mary Lou took a deep breath. What was the trouble? Why, that was a fairly hard question to answer. In one sense, nothing was the trouble, in another sense, everything was the trouble. She was bothered by something and she couldn't quite pin it down.
She said: "Look, there are some questions I have to ask you. Some things I have to find out."
"Shoot."
"Are you a lesbian?"
"Yes."
"Oh. That's . ... what I thought."
"It must have been pretty obvious."
"Yes, I guess so. Don't you ever do it with boys?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because it doesn't turn me on."
"Oh." She sighed and her big breasts bobbed with the motion. "Look," she said, "am I ... am I...."
"Are you a lesbian?"
"Well, am I?"
"No."
"But I enjoyed-"
"You enjoyed making love with me," Kathy said. "There's nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of women who like it both ways, honey. They get kicks with men or with women, either way. There's nothing wrong with being a switch-hitter like that, or ac-dc, or bisexual, or whatever you want to call it. You get to have twice as much fun."
"Uh-huh. Just like that."
Mary Lou bit her lip. "It was really great," she said. "What you did to me. It felt wonderful, I mean. And then I got to thinking what it would be like to do it, I mean actively, I mean like you were doing-"
"And?"
"I decided I might like it. That's what got me scared that I might be a lesbian."
"I don't think you have anything to worry about."
"I guess not. Kathy?"-What?"
"I have to go swimming now,"
"All right."
"But-tonight-"
"Tonight I'll teach you a whole bushel basket full of tricks," Kathy said. "Tonight I'll show you what it's all about"
Kathy grinned, then came forward and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. Kathy's hand brushed her breast and Mary Lou felt the vague quickenings of heartbeat and breathing that signalled the onrush of sexual desire. Daringly she put out a hand and touched the front of Kathy's dungarees about six inches below the belt. Her fingers moved teasingly and Kathy gasped.
"Tonight," Kathy said. "If we can wait that long."
Kathy left the room. Mary Lou sighed dreamily. Everything was going to be all right after all, she told herself. She wasn't a lesbian at all. She was bisexual, she could do it with boys or with girls, she could enjoy it either way.
And that way she got to have twice as much fun.
"Just four more days," Lacie Marmon said. "Not much time at all, is it?"
"I wish we could stay another week," Tillie said.
"Sure, and get fired," Elsie said. "Tell the truth, I'll be happy to get back to the city." This meant: You both found guys and I didn't and the hell with this place.
"I'm having fun here," Lacie said. "Kenny's a wonderful guy. He's lots of fun. A really manly man." This meant: Kenny is a stud, and I'm enjoying myself.
"Kenny must be a lot of fun," Tillie said. "Jeff is wonderful, though. A real gentleman, the kind of man you would want to spend years with." This meant: You're getting laid, but Jeff is the kind of boy you don't have to lay for, and maybe In a million years he might marry me, although I know he won't, but it doesn't hurt to dream, does it?
"I'll tell you," Elsie said, "I'm really happy for the two of you. I really am." This meant: Why the hell did I get left out? I wish you two lucky witches would kindly drop dead.
"We have a fairly nice set-up in Hartford," Gwen Purlie said. "Not as wild as the Eastport crowd, that wacky group that Walt and Mary Forsythe run. But ue have a pretty good time together, all in all."
"How's it work?" Phil Fallon asked.
"It's simple enough. Six couples, and we meet once a week at one of the couples houses. It rotates from week to week. We have a perfectly open party-no flirting, no making out in the kitchen, none of that stuff. We play records and talk. A lot of the conversation is about sex, but I guess you get that anywhere nowadays."
"Pretty much."
"And then at the end of the party we pair off."
"With keys?"
"No, that seemed to be awfully trite. We found another way. All the men leave the room, see, and the wives take off their underpants and toss them in a heap on the floor, and then the men take turns picking out panties. When you pick a girl's pants, she's the girl you go home with."
"Whose house do you go to?"
"The woman's house."
"What about kids?"
"Oh, there's no problem," Gwen said. She fluffed her light brown hair. "The kids are always asleep. And the guys always leave early in the morning so that the kids don't catch on. Besides, the way kids learn everything so early these days, it doesn't really make too much difference."
"I guess not," Phil said. "Sue and I have been switching with the Devereauxs for awhile, and we've had things going with a few other couples now and then, but nothing like a club."
"It's a lot of fun with a club."
"It sounds like it. What happens if a husband picks his own wife's pants?"
"Then he's stuck with her."
"That must be hard to take."
"It doesn't happen often. I mean, a wife tells her husband in advance what pants she's wearing. It makes it safer."
Phil nodded. "How about kids? That always worries me-you know, having Sue get pregnant and not know who the father is."
"You don't stand much chance with the contraceptive pills, though."
"I guess not."
Gwen sighed. "Uh-Phil?"
He looked at her. She was naked, of course, lying on her side with her warm breasts bulging. He tweaked a nipple and watched it stiffen lustily.
He said: "Ready for more?"
"Uh-huh."
"Any ideas?"
"You name it. I'll go for anything right now, just so we have a ball."
"I've got a great idea," he said. "You lie on your back on the bed, see, with your knees bent a little and your thighs apart."
"And?"
"And I'll lie face-down on top of you. and we'll have fun like that."
"Swell," Gwen Purlie said. "I haven't done it that way in ages."
CHAPTER SIX
Jeff was on the porch when Ora Cadbury called to him. "Mrs. Turner in 218," she said. "I think he wants you to make a run for more booze."
Jeff nodded. Turner, he thought. That was the guy whose wife had balled for him on the beach that day. Well, what the hell-if Turner's wife had to go outside the family pale to get her ashes hauled, maybe Turner could use a little variety himself. He hurried up the stairs to 218 and knocked on the door.
Turner opened the door in his bathrobe. Mrs. Turner didn't seem to be around. Jeff remembered having seen her in the front room-she was probably still down there.
"Fellow," Turner said, "can you pick me up a fifth of J & B?"
"I can get you anything you want," Jeff said. "J & B. That's Scotch, you know."
"I know."
Turner handed him a ten. "And you can keep the change, son."
"Thank you," Jeff said. "And if there's anything else you want, Mr. Turner, I can get it for you."
"Like mix? Thanks, but I drink it straight."
Stupid, unsubtle louse, Jeff thought. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and lowered his eyes in an attempt to look shy, although he didn't feel especially shy at all.
"Or anything else," he said softly, meaningfully. "Anything else you might like, Mi. Turner."
"Wait a minute."
Jeff looked up.
"Like what?"
"Well," Jeff said.
"You mean women?"
"That's the idea."
"A whore?"
"Sure," Jeff said.
"I'm stupid," Turner said. "You mean there's actually whores in this state? Real live whores?"
"Well, they're hard to find. But I know a few girls."
"I'm damned. That's a hell of a fine idea, son. What does a decent whore cost in this part of the state?"
He hesitated, but only for a moment. "Around twenty," he said, watching Turner's face. The price didn't seem to bother the man. "Unless you want something special, that is."
"Special?"
"Well, anything far out. That would run you thirty."
"Cheap enough," Turner said. "Listen, it looks like a good night to knock one off. But I got a wife here. I don't want her walking in on me."
"Suppose you go to the girl's place?"
"I could do that."
"Let's go," Jeff said. "I'll take you right over there."
Kathy Mills walked along the lakeshore, a blanket draped over her arm and a cigarette hanging limp from the comer of her mouth. Damned soon, she thought. In a few minutes Mary Lou would meet her, and they would spread out the blanket and take off all their clothes, and then the world would start to go around again.
Fine.
Great.
Perfect.
There was no point in using a bedroom. She was going to show Mary Lou a lot of fairly far-out tricks, some of which might make the two of them make quite a bit of noise, and when two girls were closeted in a bedroom and noise came out of ft people quite often put two and two together (or put six and nine together, for that matter) and came up with the right answer.
Besides, it was far too nice a night to waste indoors. The air was cool, there was the gentlest of breezes, the waves lapped hypnotically at the shores of Lake Champlain, and the full moon hung inches over the horizon like a fat, orange wafer. On a night like that, you didn't make love indoors. You went outside and had an absolute ball for yourselves taking the holiest of communions with Nature.
They hadn't even walked to the spot together. It probably wouldn't have aroused anyone's suspicions, since everybody already had one Mary Lou Timmel pegged as a nymph and one Kathy Mills as a frigid virgin, and nobody was likely to see the pair of them walking with a blanket and suspect a lesbian affair. But why take chances. This way she wandered off with a blanket and later Mary Lou wandered off too, and nobody even associated the two of them at all.
She kept walking. To her right she heard scuffling, giggling, and the beginnings of passion. Kenny and that New York pig with the big boobs, she thought, That was a good combination-good for Kathy Mills, anyway. According to what she had been able to piece together. Kenny had been balling Mary Lou rather regularly for awhile until the pig from New York came on the scene. Then Kenny got assigned to Miss Jackson Heights and that was that. Mary Lou was on the outside looking in and Kathy had had a chance to make her move.
And her move had gone beautifully.
Just beautifully.
She found the spot, a cool clear area in the center of a small stand of cedar. She spread the blanket and sat down on it, waiting. When Mary came, she thought, everything was going to be fine. Even better than she had expected, for that matter. When she first decided to seduce Mary Lou, she had figured on doing all the work herself. Even that would be enough-just to have that beautiful body handy whenever she felt like going down on it.
But it was going to be even better than that. Much better than that, if she was any judge. Already, without any prompting on her part, Mary Lou had begun thing of herself as playing the active role, had begun speculating upon the various possibilities. Tonight Mary Lou would get some elementary lessons in the mechanics of lesbian love and the tremendous possibilities that lay open to her. Kathy started shivering just thinking about it.
That was all she needed to make the summer perfect. Other gay girls might not have been satisfied so easily. Some of them didn't want just sex-they were looking for love, and the idea of sharing a piece like Mary Lou with half the men in the world would have turned their stomachs. But Kathy didn't work that way. She didn't love the girl and she didn't want to love her. And, furthermore, she didn't give a rolling damn who Mary balled when she was on her own. What did she care? Hell, she wasn't possessive.
All she cared about was having a pleasant summer, and all she needed for a pleasant summer was plenty of food and plenty of fresh air and not too much hard work and plenty of sex. The food and the fresh air were bountiful at Cadbury's Lodge. The work was not too hard and, to be honest, there wasn't very much of it.
And Mary Lou would provide plenty of sex.
The girl was simply a sexpot. That was all there was to it, Kathy realized. Certain people are born for certain things, and it is only in those pursuits that they are able to realize their full potential. Mary Lou's predetermined bent was sex. You could no more lock her away in a convent than you could teach a dyed-in-the-wool sailor to be happy in the middle of the desert. There was never a question of corrupting Mary Lou's morals, because morality didn't enter the picture where the girl was concerned. The kindest thing you could do for her was just to ensure her as much sexual activity as she could possibly want., and Kathy would give her all she could handle.
Which was plenty.
God, where teas the girl? Kathy drew a breath, held it in her lungs until she was slightly dizzy, then exhaled and breathed in again. Mary Lou should have been here already. Maybe she changed her mind, maybe she got cold feet, maybe she met some damned male-
Relax, she told herself. Relax and be calm. She's coming. Shell be here any minute.
She lit a cigarette and smoked. She was halfway through with it when she heard someone coming, moving along the shore toward the grove. She stood up, moved out of the grove to check on the visitor. It was Mary Lou.
"Hi," she said breathlessly. "Sorry I'm late."
"I was starting to worry."
"Well. I had a few things to do. Gee, this place is beautiful at night"
"So are you."
"And so are you, Kathy." Mary Lou sighed. "I've been thinking about this all day. Ever since we talked before."
"And?"
"I'm all hot."
Kathy grinned. "Good," she said.
"You, too?"
"Uh-huh."
"Oh, good," Mary Lou said. "Oh, good. Let's take off all our clothes, honey. And you can show me a lot of nice dirty tricks, and we'll have fun." She giggled lewdly. "We can just go on all night. That's one thing-men get tired after once or twice or three times, and they have to rest and everything. But we can just go on and on and on, can't we?"
"Oh, yes," Kathy said. "Oh, yes, baby. We certainly can."
Lydia Turner was in the living room when her husband left the lodge with Jeff. She watched the two of them go, her face expressionless. She sat very still for several moments, trying to digest the meaning of what she had just seen.
Item: Her husband had left the lodge with Jeff.
Item: She had slept with Jeff.
Item: Things were going to hell in a hand basket.
If Jeff had decided to tell her husband, possible to get his hands on some hush money or something, he would be telling Charles nothing that he hadn't already taken for granted. So that was certainly nothing to worry about. But if Charles and Jeff were cooking up some adultery evidence so that the bastard wouldn't have to pay any alimony, maybe that was something to worry about.
No.
Because Charles wouldn't try a stunt like that. In the first place, he wasn't one for washing dirty linen in the public square. And, more important, she had enough evidence set him to make the high cost of leaving soar to undreamed of heights.
So the hell with why the two of them were suddenly buddies. They had driven off together in the boy's Chevy. The Turner Oldsmobile was still parked outside.
Fine.
And dandy.
It was a good thing they had taken Jeff's car, she thought. Because otherwise she would not be able to leave the lodge that night, and she damn well intended to leave it. Not for a little run into Vergennes, either. Not for a grand tour of scenic Vermont, the Green Mountain catastrophe. Not for a joy-ride and not to look for a pickup and not for a breath of fresh air and not for a bite to eat and not for most of the usual reasons for driving off a the family car at night.
For another reason.
She was leaving.
Leaving. Packing her clothes, tossing her bag in her car, and getting the hell away from Cadbury's Lodge. Driving straight home and getting the lawyer on the phone and hopping a plane for Reno to live out the six months residence requirement. Damnit, she would divorce that louse before he knew she was gone. And he could walk home, and to hell with him.
She got to her feet and hurried upstairs to the room. The place was a mess-old Charles tended to turn a place into a pigsty when he was drinking, and he hadn't gotten away from the sauce in all the time they had been at Cadbury's. Yes, he drank all right. Drank enough to try raping her, for the love of God.
That had been the last straw. The marriage was already beyond redemption, but when a husband tried to rape his wife he lost all claim to her affection, and Charles had had a sufficiently tenuous claim to begin with. She hurried through the room, opening one of the large suitcases, placing it on the bed. and throwing clothes into it When the suitcase was full she lugged it out of the room and down the stairs without bothering to call down for a bellhop. She carried the suitcase straight out of the lodge and tossed it into the back seat of the car and got behind the wheel.
Good-bye, Charles, she thought. Good-bye, Cadbury's. Good-bye marriage.
And to hell with all of you, by God.
She started the big Olds, put the accelerator on the floor. The wheels kicked up gravel as the car took off and picked up speed, heading away from Cadbury's Lodge and away from Charles. As she drove her mind was almost blank. There was no sense of triumph, nor was there any feelings of regret-just a vaguely pleasant sensation of having moved from a bad situation into one which promised to be infinitely better in every respect.
Charles squashed a cigarette in the ash tray just as Jeff Baylor pulled to a stop in front of a white frame house on the outskirts of Middlebury. It had been a long ride. A trip is always much longer when you don't know where you're going. You become conscious of all the turns and crossroads which you ignore or take for granted when you know the route, and thus it seems to be longer. Middlebury was only twelve miles from Vergennes, but Charles Turner felt as though they had driven halfway to forever.
"This is the place," he heard Jeff say. "The girl's name is Marge. She's good to look at and she'll do anything in the world. Sound okay to you?"
"Sounds fine."
"It'll cost you twenty for a straight trick and thirty for a specialty. Good enough?"
"Good enough."
"Which do you want?"
"Oh," Charles Turner said vacantly. "Uh a specialty."
"Right." Jeff opened the door on his side, swung his legs over the edge of the seat. "Stay right here," he said. "I'll make the arrangements."
He watched the boy go to the front door and ring the bell. The door opened briefly, just long enough for Turner to get a quick look at the woman. She was fine, he saw. Fleshy on top and fleshy on the bottom, with big eyes and a willing mouth.
Fine.
The door had dosed now. Charles Turner lit another cigarette, took two puffs of it and threw it out the window. At least he wasn't being conned-he could be sure of that. There was a quick and easy con in this sort of game-you drove the man out, took his money, went around the comer, came back, told him it was all set, then sent him in the house and drove away before he realized there was nobody there. But they wouldn't pull that sort of thing on him, not when he was a guest in the hotel where the boy worked. No, this was on the level, and it was a damned good thing. He needed it.
The door opened a few seconds later. This time Turner didn't get to see the girl. Jeff hurried down the walk, arms swinging at sides and a cocky expression on his face. A sharp little son, Turner thought. A really sharp son of a gun.
Jeff pulled open the door, got into the car. "All set," he said. "She's waiting for you."
"I can go right in?"
"Sure."
"Good," Turner said. He hesitated. "Uh ... how do I get back to the lodge?"
"I'll drive you. Pick you up in half an hour?"
"Better make it an hour," Turner said, grinning. He got out of the car, gave the door a swing shut and headed up the path to the house. He didn't feel drunk now, or depressed, or drugged. He felt like a million dollars after taxes.
Jeff watched him go, then shrugged his shoulders and drove off just as Marge was opening the door. Perfect, he thought. Fifteen bucks for little Jeff, plus the ten bucks for the fifth of J & B that Turner had brilliantly forgotten about. Making a total of twenty-five bucks for a little less than a half-hour's work.
Which wasn't bad.
Marge would take good care of the guy, too. At first he had figured on letting Turner be Sara's first trick, but two factors made him settle on Marge. In the first place he had the guy pegged as some kind of pervert, and since Marge would go any route that anybody could want it would be simpler to give her the business. And there was also the fact that Sara didn't have a convenient place to carry on business, since she still lived with her mother. He sort of figured on using Sara for tricks at the lodge and farming the others out to Marge and Linda.
Now he had an hour to kill while old Turner got his ashes hauled. Well, a bar was the best place to kill it. A quiet Middlebury bar where he could nurse a glass or two of ale and let his mind dream up some more money-makers. Like where to get a connection for pornographic pictures and movies, for example. You could push a lot of those if you had the connections.
He picked a bar not far from the Middlebury College campus, took a booth instead of a bar-stool and ordered a bottle of Miller's High Life. It was light and dry and he found himself liking the taste, but he still nursed the beer along. There was never any point in drinking enough to feel it. You only got in trouble that way.
He was there fifteen minutes when he heard the guys in the booth behind him talking. Three of them, three college kids on vacation. They were looking for women. They had spent the afternoon and evening trying to pick up dates, and now they weren't obsessed with seducing any more. They were willing to pay for it if only they could find somebody to ball.
Jeff smiled.
Slowly, casually, he got to his feet and joined the three of them in their booth. "I couldn't help overhearing you," he said softly. "And if you're looking for a girl, I might be able to help out."
They stared at him.
"She's about seventeen," he said. "Stacked oat to here and ready for action."
"What is she? A nymph?"
"A hooker," he said.
"What's she charge?"
"Twenty," he said. "In a town like New York she'd get fifty or a hundred, but this isn't New York, so it's just twenty."
"Oh, God," one of them said.
"Too steep for you?"
"Kind of."
He took a breath. "Ill tell you," he said, "maybe we could make it a package deal. Like fifty bucks for the three of you."
"You her-"
"I'm her manager," he said smoothly. Manager, he thought-what the hell, it was a nicer word than pimp. "Fifty's still kind of high."
"For that she spends the night. Three of you can have all you want of her."
That cinched it They went for it, told him they had a cottage on the river. He got the address, then hopped into the car and headed for Vergennes. It was more driving this way but he could afford the time, and he wanted to give Sara the business. He pushed the Chevy hard and the car ate up the miles to Sara's place. Her mother said she wasn't home. He tried the coffee pot where she had worked. She was there, but she wasn't working, just sitting on a stool sipping a vanilla malted through a straw. She had a yellow sweater on and her boobs were twisting the poor thing all out of shape. And no bra, naturally. All of a sudden he felt very damned envious of these college kids.
"C'mon," he told her. "I've got a job for you."
In the car he filled her in on the deal. She was delighted. She sat close to him with her head on his shoulder and told him how much fun she would have with the three boys. She told him the boys would get all excited and feel wonderful and that it would make her feel good. He decided she was crazy but it didn't really bother him. He put a hand on her shoulder and then let it drop to her breast. He kneaded the firm flesh and drove back to Middlebury. He had plenty of time to drop her off at their cottage before he picked up Turner.
"I just feel so wonderful," Mary Lou said. She yawned and stretched, then reached for the thing and picked it up. "This is really great," she said. "What do you call this thing again?"
"A dildo."
"That's right. Gee, it's big. Can you imagine a guy like this? I mean, it's terrific." She heard Kathy giggling and she smiled herself. "Besides," she added, "it never gets limp. Stop laughing at me, darling. Oh, I feel so fine!"
"I'm glad."
"I'm really perverted, Kathy."
"Don't be silly."
"But I am!"
"Why?"
She sighed, dosed her eyes. "Because I just can't get enough," she said. "I always want it. You can't tell me that's normal."
"There's a difference between normal and desirable. You're just luckier than most people."
"Really?"
Mary Lou thought it over. Maybe that was it, maybe she was just luckier being the way she was. It was hard to say one way or the other. Sometimes she felt good and sometimes she felt bad and sometimes she felt somewhere in the middle. Most of the time she was pretty pleased with things, but every once in a while she would begin to worry about the fact that she was so definitely different from everyone else. The pressures toward conformity are tremendous in every walk of modern life, and pressures toward sexual conformity are monumental. So she brooded now and then, and she worried now and then.
Now, though, she felt fine.
"Kathy?"
"What is it, honey?"
She yawned again, then cupped her big breasts in her own hands and gave them a squeeze. "Could we do it again?"
"Of course, kitten. All you want" "But only if you want to-"
"I want."
Mary Lou stretched like a fat cat in front of a roaring fire. "Good," she said lazily. "Who does who this time? You tell me what we're going to do, and away we go."
"We can both do it," Kathy said.
"How?"
"Figure it out for yourself."
She 'dosed her eyes, trying to work ft out in her mind Oh, she thought. Yes, that was how it would work.
It sounded like fun.
"How do you get started?"
Kathy said: "There are loads of ways. You can just pitch in and do it or you can work up to it. Oh, I know. We'll work up to it nicely."
"How?"
"Just lie still on your back. You'll see."
She lay very still on her back. Kathy was moving around. Then Kathy kissed her on the lips. She opened her eyes and saw Kathy's face poised upside-down over her own face. Then Kathy kissed her once more and Kathy's tongue slipped into her mouth and they abandoned themselves to the delights of the kiss.
It was weird kissing like that, Mary Lou discovered. At one point she went to throw her arms around Kathy's body and realized that she couldn't, because Kathy's body was over her head. And it was equally weird when she opened her eyes and, instead of seeing Kathy's eyes, she found herself looking at Kathy's neck. It required a whole new perspective, like going through life upside-down.
Then Kathy moved. Slowly, sensuously, Kathy wriggled downward until she was able to kiss Mary Lou's throat and shoulders. This meant, of course, that Mary Lou could kiss Kathy's throat and shoulders, which was pleasant.
More.
And now they were kissing each others breasts. That, Mary Lou realized, was really exquisite. She had always enjoyed having her own breasts kissed, and already that evening she had learned the joys to be found in kissing the breasts of another girl. So all you had to do was put the two components together and you could really have something wonderful going on. As usual, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. To kiss and be kissed at once-it was the closest thing to heaven.
Chests heaved with the fury of rapid breathing. Tongue flicked out and washed over firm breast flesh. Lips closed around nipples and sucked greedily. Mouths worked and breasts burned with the fire of growing lust.
Mary Lou's head was swimming. She was on fire now, crazy with passion, hungry for more and more and more. Her hips, captivated by the rain of kisses on her sensitive breasts, had already started swaying plaintively from side to side as an overture to love. Her breasts ached deliriously. The roof of her mouth was dry and her head throbbed.
And Kathy moved again. Like a snake, wriggling slowly and sensuously down down down over Mary Lou's body, Kathy moved. Her firm young breasts left Mary Lou's body, and her flat tummy took its place.
Mary Lou kissed that stomach.
And she had her own stomach kissed in return.
And then-
Then-
Then they were at the main event, the finale, the feature act. Now they were down to brass tacks, down to bedrock, down to the very fundamentals of lesbian love. Now, magnificently and majestically, they were making a number, a delicious number, and the world was going into a tailspin.
Mary Lou thought she was going to die, to drown in passion. Her heart hammered against her rib cage. Her body received the caresses of the gods and throbbed with the beauty of it all. And she gave as much as she took, gave pleasure and took pleasure and found pleasure for herself in both the giving and the taking.
More. More. More-
Until her head was reeling and her body was aching and her world was whooping and sliding and splashing, and more and more and more, and all she could feel was the soothing balm of Kathy's yearning mouth, and all she could taste was the sweet essential goodness of Kathy, and all the world went off like a bomb.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lydia was gone.
It took a while for this fact to sink in. Turner got back to the lodge around eleven, his heart still a little shaky from the wild time that the whore had shown him, his body damp and grimy with old sweat, and the first thing he did was look for the J & B bottle. The second thing he did was remember that the kid-Jeff-had never gotten around to buying the liquor for him. The third thing he did was remember that the kid still had his ten bucks, and the fourth thing was decide that the kid-Jeff-could keep the ten bucks for his troubles. For one thing, the thirty-dollar bit he had just had was one he would gladly have paid a hundred for. For another, he didn't really need a drink any more He had just gotten balled six ways and backward, and the balling cancelled out the erstwhile need for the stimulus-narcosis combination. God's second sweetest gift to man. The fifth thing he did was wonder where the hell Lydia had gone to.
He went downstairs and started looking for her. Not that he particularly wanted to see her. because he didn't. But for some reason or other he thought he was supposed to see Lydia now. Maybe to tell her where he had been, and to inform her that the Vermont whore could give her cards, spades and little casino and still top her every day of the month. Including the bad days, for that matter.
Not surprisingly, he didn't find Lydia. Probably squirming around underneath some dishwasher, he decided. Except that Lydia never squirmed, of course. She just sort of lay there and let you boff her. She didn't squirm, not ever.
The whore did. God in heaven!
He sighed, pleased with the memory. That was the fine thing about a really good piece of tail-you didn't just have the pleasure when it happened, but you got to enjoy and savor the memory as well. If you really had a memory, you could summon up recollections of every little nuance of a good piece years after it had happened. And this was one he would remember, by God. She had been the best in ages.
Back to Lydia Where on earth was she?
He asked around The old bag who ran the place, the Cadbury woman. He found Owen Cadbury right off the bat, but there was no point asking him anything because he was stewed to the ever-loving gills again. Then he found Ora Cadbury and, casually as possible, he asked her if she had happened to see his wife.
"I think she went for a ride," the Cadbury woman said, her eyes probing his.
"Oh?" A properly noncommittal reply, he told himself. You couldn't get into too much hot water saying ok like that.
"She had a suitcase with her," Ora Cadbury said. "She left . oh, a few minutes after you did."
He thanked her and walked away, puzzled. The old witch didn't miss a trick, he thought. Knew where the guests went and when and probably why and with whom. But where the hell was Lydia?
He went back to the room. This time he managed to figure it out. Lydia, to put it simply, was gone. Her clothes were gone and her suitcase was gone and her cosmetics were gone and everything, in fact, that had belonged to Lydia-everything was gone.
And so was his car.
Great, he thought. "Great," he said aloud. Man, it was fine and dandy all right. Lydia, lousy little Lydia, had taken off. She hadn't left a forwarding address, but he could figure out where she was readily enough. It was obvious-she was on her way home, and then she would divorce him. and that would be the end of their marriage.
This didn't bother him. Hell, if their were two things that he wanted to see the end of, one was Lydia and the other was their marriage. In that respect it was a blessing. But here he was, earless and wifeless and alone at a goddamn lodge in Vermont on the shores of scenic Lake Champlain. The question that occurred him was painfully obvious. Where the hell did he go from here?
The answer, when it finally came, was equally obvious. He went nowhere. He stayed right where he was.
Because, he thought now, there was no reason why a vacation in Vermont, a vacation at Cadbury's Lodge, should be a bad thing after all. It was a bad thing when you had your wife long and the two of you hated each other. But if she had left you, it could be just what the witch doctor ordered.
For one thing, the bellhop was a pimp who, evidently, could supply almost any illicit commodity at a moment's notice.
For another thing, one of the most agreeable and inventive whores in creation lived just a few miles away.
For a third thing, the bulk of the guests at the hotel seemed to be wife-swappers of one persuasion or another, and the major sport indoors and out seemed to be sex. He hadn't been able to do anything about that before, since he had Lydia along, but now he might be able to get into the act. He might have a little trouble, since he didn't have a wife to trade, and that put him in the position of a would-be Peter Minuit who had neglected to bring some beads with which to con the Indians. Still, he might find and agreeable single girl and couple up with her, thus making himself acceptable to the wife-trading crew. Or, if worst came to worst, he could hire that Middlebury whore at so many bucks a night and use her as trading material.
For a fourth thing, the management didn't seem to give much of a damn what you did, just so you paid your bill and smiled at them now and then.
For still another thing, there was a nymphy chambermaid whom he had been dying to lay.
And, for a final thing, there was no reason-repeat: No reason-for him to go home again. He didn't want to see his wife. He didn't want to see his friends. He had no pressing business hanging fire, and he had more than enough money at his command to ride out the summer in style, even if he was locked into buying a new car. No Olds this time, he thought suddenly. No big family car. Something nice and sporty, the kind of job the girls go for, and go down for. Something small and convertible and foreign-he would have to see what was available.
He grinned. It was just as well that the bellhop had conned him out of that ten-spot, since he certainly didn't need liquor right now. He didn't need anything at all, by God. From absolute depression he had soared straight up to the heights, and at the moment he most definitely seemed to be the happiest and most satisfied and most thoroughly self-sufficient man on earth. Or on any planet, for that matter. He was all set, with no worries and lots of happy scenes to anticipate, and he didn't need Scotch to ease the pain because there was no pain that required easing.
Downstairs, he ran into Ora Cadbury again. She seemed once again to be studying him, as though she knew that Lydia had run off and wanted to see how he would take it.
He gave her a wide grin. Damnit, if she wanted a reaction, she was going to get one. An off-beat one, too.
"My dear Mrs. Cadbury," he said happily, "I have some good news for you. My wife has left me."
"Oh," Ora Cadbury said. Hell, he thought, she could be every bit as noncommittal as he could.
"So I won't be leaving the end of the week, as planned."
"You'll be leaving in the morning?"
"No," he said gleefully. "Not at all. I'll be staying until the end of the summer." He grinned hugely, lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. "You run a wonderful place here, Mrs. Cadbury. So far there's only been one thing wrong with it."
"What's that?"
"My wife's been here. But she's gone now, so that removes my sole objection to Cadbury's Lodge. I'm looking forward to a most enjoyable summer, Mrs. Cadbury."
With her mouth hanging open, he thought, she looked a little like the fish that were theoretically supposed to abound in Lake Champlain. He turned on his heel and left her gaping there, then started up to his room. He was halfway up the stairs when he realized that there was no reason on earth for him to go back to his room now. Before, with Lydia around, he had spent all his time sitting around the room and guzzling Scotch. But Lydia was goae now. He could socialize and circulate and mingle with the best of them.
He went down the stairs again and headed through the main room of the lodge. On the way, he passed a pretty waitress, one he had always ignored previously although he had occasionally speculated on the veracity or fallacy of her mammarial development. He had always thought they looked a little too good to be true, but he had to admit that they had a very realistic bounce to them, one which you could hardly build into foam rubber.
"For the hell of it, he pinched her ass on the way to the porch. And, amazingly, she giggled. God. he thought, it was going to be the greatest summer ever.
Jack and Betty Devereaux were alone together. This condition had come about more or less by accident. Sue Fallon and Dan Purlie had coupled up, and Phil Fallon and Gwen Purlie had similarly coupled up, and this left the Devereauxs alone with each other. Much as they might have preferred to be with someone else's husband or wife, they were locked.
It was a cool clear sort of night, starless, with a full moon that cast hazy shadows on the ground, outlining the trees weirdly. They stood together about twenty or thirty yards from the lodge. Jack was smoking a cigar. Betty had a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
"Nice night," she said.
"Uh-huh."
"And here we are."
"And here we are, all right."
She finished the beer and litter-bugged the can into the bushes. "Actually it's just as well," she said. "I don't think I could take it tonight. It's getting sore."
"What's getting sore?"
"Guess."
"Oh," he said. He chewed the cigar. "Quite a summer," he said. "You know, this is really great."
"The summer?"
The pastime. Wife-swapping."
"I don't see why they call it that," she said archly. "It makes it sound as though you men do all the trading, like eskimos sharing their wives with houseguests. We girls are in on it too, you know."
"Mate-trading, then. Better?"
"Much better, thank you."
Jack gave her a mock bow. "Greatest idea in the world, whatever you want to call it. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately-"
"A lot of something else, too."
True, but thinking, too. Deep thinking. Let me ask you a properly rhetorical question. What's the greatest thing in the world?"
Her reply, unfortunately, cannot be reproduced here. It was not printable.
"Exactly," Jack Devereaux said. "And what's the one thing that can louse it up? Boredom, that's what. The most frightening thing in the world is the idea of getting bored with the person you're laying steadily. Now, you know what people usually do about it. They find someone else."
"Adultery."
"Uh-huh." He took her arm, steered her down toward the lake. His cigar was just a stub now. He chewed the end and took a small puff on it. "Adultery," he repeated. "But adultery has a few drawbacks. For one thing, no matter how broad-minded you are, you get a little resentful when you find out that your mate is having an affair with someone else. You don't like it It doesn't set right"
"When you and Mary Jarvis-"
"That's what I mean. Like with me and Mary Jarvis. Now, here's the whole problem-how can you eliminate the boredom without stirring up the jealousy bit?"
"Mate-trading," Betty said.
"Right you are. That covers all the requirements. You can hardly be jealous of your wife when at the very same time you're boffing the eyes out of her lover's wife, can you? Not a chance. So instead of a covert and smelly little affair you have a fine social custom, designed for complete mutual satisfaction. No worry about somebody's husband or somebody's wife catching on. No hasty tumbles in the back seats of cars. Just honest open-minded sex."
The reflection of moon on lake was almost blinding. They were at the shore now. Jack tossed his cigar into the water and listened as it hissed itself out. Betty took a final puff on her cigarette and pitched it into the lake.
"Honest open-minded sex," he said again. "Damn it, I don't see why everyone doesn't go for it. It's just puritan-ism, that's all it is. When any man tells me he can make love to the same woman every night for ten or twenty years without getting bored with her, without getting anxious to try something new, I say to myself that the guy's either a liar or an idiot. It doesn't make sense."
"Uh-huh."
"Not that I'm bored with you-"
"Of course not," she said. "But a little variety makes everything that much better."
He nodded gratefully. "It spices things up," he said. "It make you appreciate your own mate more, that's exactly what it does. Now, some guys stay true to their wives, and they get a little bored, and they imagine what it would be like to boff somebody else, and they damn near dream about it. Then they pride themselves on being faithful. Now what goddamn crazy kind of sense does that make?"
"You're right."
"You know what we need? We need the kind of club the Purlies have."
"It would be nice."
"Damn right it would. You not only gei tremendous variety, but you have a nice steady once-a-week relationship with a little spice in the manner of selecting a partner. I like the idea."
"So do I."
"As soon as we get back home-"
"Why wait until then?" Betty's eyes brightened. "We don't have to wait that long," she said. "We can start a little club out here. We've got the nucleus already--us and the Fallons and the Purlies. There will be others."
"Hey," he said. "Sounds good."
"Nothing wrong with it, is there?"
"Not a thing."
"And we could have ... oh, you'll think I'm terrible."
"What?"
"I was going to say we could have orgies, sort of. You know-with stag movies and everything. And coupling off and trading and just going wild. What the hell, honey, it's the summer and we're all a little crazy anyway and no one back home would ever find out about it. Why not?"
"Great," Jack said.
"And we could-"
"Take off your clothes," Jack said.
She stared at him.
"All this talk," he said. "It's getting me horny as a stag. Take your clothes off. We're going for a moonlight swim."
"Now?"
"Now. In the nude."
"Golly."
"Sound okay?"
"Sounds divine,' Betty Devereaux said. "If you don't think it'll be boring, or anything. After all, I'm your wife and you're my husband and all."
Jack grinned. "No chance on boredom," he said. "I'm going to take my own wife underwater. That s something we've never done before, baby.
She smiled in return, finished getting her clothes off.
They wound up in a tangled pile on the beach. She shook her big breasts at him gave him a racy bump-and-grind, then reached out and fondled him briefly with her hot little hands. He made a grab for her and she dashed away and raced into the lake.
He caught her, fortunately. And they weren't bored at all, not a bit. They almost drowned at one point, but they very definitely were not bored.
That night, their last night at Cadbury's the honeymooning Yarrows had their first real fight. She started talking about charge accounts, and about the necessity of having a baby soon, and about a house with heavy furniture, and he, for the first time, got an idea of some of the less-than-delightful components of marriage. He ranted and raved a little, and she wept and blubbered a little, and it was their first real fight. But they were young and in love and it was their honeymoon, albeit the last night of their honeymoon and they settled their differences the way all honeymooners settle their differences. In bed.
That night, Ora Cadbury got sufficiently horny to drag her husband into bed with her and stimulate him for twenty minutes until he was in condition to make love to her. The method she used was one she had used in her salad days as a whore in Newport, and it still worked like a charm. She needed it desperately, and it was better than she had hoped, and she reached ecstasy. Rolling away from Owen, she smiled at the realization that he would not remember it in the morning. In some ways, she told herself, it was a good thing that he was an alcoholic. If he had remembered what she had done to him, he would have been embarrassed later.
That night. Kathy Mills and Mary Lou Timmel brushed their teeth incessantly.
That night, Charles Turner had the first really good night's sleep in ages. He had slept solidly before, but only because there had been enough alcohol in his veins to assure a steady sleep. Now he slept sober and he slept like a top. He woke up feeling virile as a bull with a skinful of Spanish Fly.
That night, Jeff Baylor drove all the way to Burlington where be found an all-night restaurant open. He talked to a few people and asked a few questions and kept his eyes and ears open, and finally somebody told him to go to a place called Doc's and meet a man named Sammy. He went to Doc's and he met Sammy. Sammy took him to a place where you could get liquor after hours, but Jeff didn't want any. He smoked cigarettes while Sammy drank. They talked for two hours, at which time Jeff knew what it would cost him to rent pornographic movies. He rented five reels and a projector. He bought a stack of dirty pictures and a supply of sexual contraband-French ticklers, dildoes, special vaginal lubricants, and so on and so forth. He drove all of these things back to the lodge and left them locked in his car, and then he went to sleep.
That night, Sara laid the three college boys in Middlebury and decided that whoring was infinitely easier and more remunerative and more pleasurable than slinging hash. She had fun.
That night it rained, bat it stopped by morning. The sun was bright and the sky was blue when dawn broke.
Rich and Marilyn Cameron checked into the lodge a few minutes past noon that day. They drove up in a Studebaker Lark station wagon, and were met by a big woman named Ora Cadbury, who told them she was sure they would enjoy their stay. Then a bellhop named Jeff escorted them to their room and told them he could take care of anything they might want. He pocketed the fifty cents Rich handed him, said thanks, and slipped Rich a sly wink. "Strange place," Marilyn said.
"Yes," Rich said. "Well, maybe we're just not used to the country yet. Something like that."
They were a good-looking couple in their late twenties. Rich, a CPA with a fair practice, was tall and thin with jet-black hair and cold blue eyes. Marilyn was a stunning redhead with a sweet-cream complexion and an hourglass shape. At lunch, a blonde who introduced herself as Sue Fallon kept rubbing her leg against Rich's leg. A man who introduced himself as Dan Purlie didn't take his eyes off Marilyn's body throughout the meal.
"Strange crowd they got here," Rich said.
"Very," Marilyn said. "But maybe we just haven't gotten used to them yet. The vacation spirit and all."
During the afternoon, a waitress named Kathy kept tossing glances at Marilyn that seemed positively queer, and a man named Charles Turner patted her on the behind and uttered an unbelievably obscene invitation that made her blush all the way to her genitalia. A chambermaid named Mary Lou with the biggest breasts in captivity kept waving her lush boobs in Rich's face and let him know that she was available if he was ever in the mood.
"You know-" Rich said.
"I know."
"A really strange place."
"A nest of sex maniacs is more like it. I don't think there's a normal person here."
"They may be normal."
"Not that Kathy creature. She's a dyke from the word go. And the others all seem to be crazy for the same thing. I don't call it normal when a slew of people want to switch husbands and wives around. Do you?"
He didn't answer her but just changed the subject. This worried her.
After dinner, Marilyn wandered outside and managed to lose herself in the woods for a little while. There was a large rock in among a grove of white pine. She sat on the rock and drank in the fresh air and thought about things.
In a way, Rich was a strange man. He was a fine husband and a considerate lover, certainly, but she always felt that there were parts of him she would never know, facets to his personality which would be forever hidden from her. They lived in Long Island, in a rather nice Nassau County development. When they were home, in their own circle of friends, Rich was the person she had married, the man she loved. But there were periods of time when he was not home. He had a strong streak of wanderlust, and some nights he would stay in the city, not to work and not to meet business friends but merely to wander around. She didn't know what he did on those nights, nor did she know what kind of person he was then.
She didn't think he cheated on her with other women, but she knew that it was possible. Sometimes this bothered " er. At other times she could accept it-if he cheated it was not because he didn't love her but because that was the kind of person he was, a person who needed more than one woman to be happy, a person who had to get off by himself and have a certain amount of adventure in order to keep from going stagnant.
It was funny-you didn't think of certified public accountants as desperate, deep, moody types, hungry for adventure and unbound by conventions. But Rich, despite his facility with figures, was just that. And in a way she was glad. It would be horrible to have a husband who never surprised you, a man who was predictable in every single thing he did. A husband should keep on the move. A husband should do some things that his wife never found out about. It took a mature woman to understand this, but things worked better that way.
Right now, though, he had her puzzled. Her first reaction, she had managed to figure out that the bunch of people at Cadbury's were sex-nutty, was to check out of the place and find another resort to spend their time at. Goodness, Vermont was filled with summer places, and they could easily find one that would be better than Cadbury's Lodge and no more expensive, so what was the point in staying at this pervert convention? This was her first reaction. Fortunately, she had not given voice to it.
Because it would have been a bad thing to say.
Rich wouldn't have liked it.
Rich, for some obscure reason, liked the place. And, of course, the people. The perverts. Why?
It was one of those things she couldn't understand. What she could understand was this-something bad was going to happen to them, to Rich and to her. Something bad, something ugly, something she would not like at all. But, no matter what it was, something she already knew she would go along with.
He was the leader in their marriage. He was deeper than she was, and he was also stronger, and what strength she had lay in knowing how to be a woman, how to participate in a subservient capacity, how to acquiesce to the whims of her man. She was not a doormat. She was not a sponge. But she did what Rich wanted her to do.
And now-
Oh, Lord. Maybe she was making a big thing over nothing. Maybe the people at Cadbury's Lodge were just ordinary people and she was letting her imagination run wild. Maybe the girl who had ogled her had some optical disease and appeared to ogle everybody and wasn't really a lesbian at all. Maybe the man who had pinched her and had said such filthy things to her had just been kidding, seeing if he could shock her in a sort of good-natured way. Maybe the footsie games were all accidental or just playful, and maybe the crowd was not composed of degenerates, and maybe the bellhop had only been trying to be helpful, and maybe-A lot of maybes.
She made herself believe that all these maybes were possible. She talked herself into it, and she kept on strolling in the woods, just trying to establish same rapport with nature. Nassau County was suburban, but here is a tremendous difference between the suburbs and the country, a difference comparable to the difference between the suburbs and East Harlem. It was spacious and clean here. It was more than that-it was devoid of the sounds of civilization, the sounds of people.
Then she heard the sound of people.
She had not meant to eavesdrop. Not at all-she had only been wandering around and enjoying herself. She had wanted to get off by herself and think a little, and she had had no intentions of spying on anyone.
She heard them, though. Unmistakable sounds. The small sounds of a girl caught up in passion and the sounds of a man, and, although she didn't want to join them, she felt herself drawn to the source of the sounds like a swarm of flies to a feast.
The girl was that chambermaid, the one with the large breasts. She was lying on her back and a boy was doing it to her. She couldn't recognize the boy.
Well, she thought, at least it was normal. There was nothing wrong with it: it was perfectly normal. It might be a little disgusting to walk up and see, it but they had not told her to come and had not known she would walk in on them, and there was nothing really strange about a young boy and a young girl wandering into the woods and having a swift bout of sex under the pines, was there?
No.
There wasn't. Not at all.
But-
The second glance did it. There were not two people there, there were three people there, and the girl was not lying on her back on the ground. She was lying on her back but there was another boy between her and the ground, and that boy was on his back, and he had his arms around her and he, too, was doing it to the big-breasted chambermaid, and-
Two boys at once. One from the front and one from the rear, and the girl was caught in the middle just like Lucky Pierre.
Oh, God.
It was going to be an abnormal little summer, she thought. And, with her body strangely moved by the spectacle, it might be even worse than that. She had the tempting but frightening feeling that she might even enjoy it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was an easy, lazy day for a bellhop. No one had checked in or out, no tasks had to be performed, and Ora Cadbury was even more placid than usual. Maybe she got it last night, Jeff thought. Maybe the old boy got it up, or maybe she talked somebody on the kitchen staff into giving her a quick thrill, but whatever it was, the Cadbury broad was so peaceful and quiet that you could goof off all day long without a whisper.
Which was fine with him. He had been doing good work. During the morning he had chased the Chevy over to Marge's and to Sara's, picking up fifteen bucks from Marge and twenty-five from Sara, both of whom seemed delighted with the way things were working out. He stopped at four other resorts where he met with various bellhops and worked out a few angles. One bellhop had three men who wanted a whore in the worst way; Jeff got on the phone and called Linda in Middlebury and told her to get her rear over to the place and take the three Johns on for fifteen a throw That meant twenty-two and a half for him, too-the bellhop on the scene was getting his chunk of dough from the three men.
He sold pictures to all of the bellhops. In that spot, it was easy to peddle dirty pictures. Jeff wholesaled the stuff, middle-manning it between Sammy and the various bellhops. Like everything else, it made money for everybody.
He worked a few more deals, then came back to the lodge and ran into the Turner guy again. Turner said his wife was gone, which meant he could have a girl in the room. Jeff told him he had something good on the line, something different, a very young girl with no brains but a hell of a lot of bedroom ability. Turner said to send it over. Jeff made another run, this time into Vergennes, and picked up Sara. He smuggled her into Turner's room without the slightest bit of trouble and Turner forked over another thirty bucks, half of which belonged to one Jeff Baylor.
Groovy.
All across the board, in and out and op and down and all around, little Jeff Baylor had it made. Made in the shade, with bells on and horns tooting and the sky making like a fireworks display. All the money in the world was falling his way and all the tail in the world was there for him any time he felt like grabbing it Things were sewed up so neatly that it didn't even matter if Old Lady Cadbury caught onto the way he was goofing off and canned him. He didn't need the job any more. He had the connections working so good that he could get along easily without working at all. as far as it went. The way things stood, he figured that the job at Cadbury's provided him with room and board and a cover-and nothing much more. The two hundred and fifty bucks he was supposed to get at the end of the summer was incidental, and if he never saw it he wouldn't lay down his head and cry. It was nothing to what he was going to make on the side.
But the job gave him a room to live in, and a room would run ten a week minimum otherwise, with an additional thirty for meals unless he wanted to eat garbage. That was forty a week, which he couldn't afford to throw away.
The cover was even more important. Every city in creation had a law against vagrancy. A vagrant was someone with no visible means of support. If you were on the bum, then you were a vagrant. If you were working a racket and they wanted to get you, you were also a vagrant. The size of your bankroll didn't make any difference-the No Visible Means Of Support bit was the joker in the deck. If you could show them a job, they had to look for specific evidence in order to throw you into the cooler. If you didn't have a job, then they told you that you were a vagrant and found a cell to toss you in. The man in Dayton had taught him this and he had never forgotten it. If you were going to work something on the wrong (and thus profitable) side of the law, then you got yourself a job. Even if it was a business that lost money for you, you got it and held onto it because it was your safeguard against a vag rap.
He sat up long enough to throw a cigarette into the lake, then stretched out on the blanket again. God, he thought, this was the goddamn way to live. A hot, yellow sun in the sky, a blanket to lay down, a bathing suit to cover your crotch; a lake to jump in every once in awhile; and an angle, a nice, sweet, beautiful, lovable, little angle to keep the money rolling in-this was the life.
Hell, he thought suddenly, why find your way to Newport at all? Vacations didn't just happen in the summer, and people didn't just want women on hot nights. There were vacations and tourists all year round. There was even a winter trade in Vermont, as far as that went, with all the skiers who came up to slalom and wanted something hot and curvy to warm their beds at night.
But Vermont might get cold in the winter. Hell, there was still Miami Beach, and Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and California, and if he was a smart boy who knew the angles and who had already operated all summer long in Vermont, he could damn well find a way to get along. In places like Vegas and Miami you needed to be big and to know people in order to operate, but he could find himself a sweet set-up in one town or another and he could make it break right for him.
Vermont in the summer, Florida or Cal. in the winter. A change of scene whenever the weather or the political climate called for it.
No sweat.
Not the least little bit of sweat Just groovy gravy.
He looked up when he heard footsteps. It was Jack Devereaux, one of the wife-swapping crew. He had been dropping sly little hints to the male wife-swappers for awhile now, and it was about time they panned out. Maybe Devereaux was ready to want a little action. If so, Jeff was the man to supply it.
Then again, maybe Devereaux was just looking to put in a little time in the sun between the acts.
But that wasn't it. Devereaux wasn't dressed for the sun. for one thing. For another, he looked around carefully in all directions, then dropped to the ground beside Jeff and offered him a cigarette. Jeff shook his head, said he had just finished one. Devereaux winked at him.
"Listen." he said, "the other day you said something about being able to get anything we might want. Remember?"
"I remember."
"Were you serious?"
"I'm always serious."
"Yeah?"
"Yes," he said. It was true, he realized. He didn't kid around, not ever. Other people played games. He didn't. "I could use something," Devereaux said cautiously. "Name it."
"Uh-"
"Go ahead and name it," Jeff said. "I don't mean I ean run into town to pick up a carton of cigarettes, for Christ's sake. I mean things you couldn't get on your own."
Devereaux took a breath. "Let's just suppose," he said.
"Let's suppose what?"
"Let's suppose a group of people warned to see a movie."
"Easy," Jeff said.
"I'm not talking about an ordinary movie."
"I didn't think you meant Lassie Come Home. I know what you mean, for Christ's sake."
"Say, you're a pretty sharp kid!"
"I know."
"Yeah." Jack Devereaux scratched his head industriously. "Well, let's suppose those people wanted to rent the movie. They wanted the movie and the projection equipment, the whole works. What could you do about it?"
"For a starter, I could get them the movies and the projection equipment."
"Really?"
God, the guy was squarer than a city block. Jeff sat up, sent a flat stone skimming across the surface of the lake. It was hard to do from a sitting position. The stone only skimmed twice before it. sank.
"Really," he said softly.
"What are the films like?"
Jeff took a picture from his pocket. It was supposed to be a still from one of the films in the car. It showed a girl making love to two men simultaneously. He passed the print to Devereaux and watched the man's eyes.
Devereaux said "Damn "
"They're not stripper movies," Jeff said. "I mean, they're the real staff."
"I guess they are."
"Three reels," Jeff said. There were five in the car, but he figured he could always rent Devereaux the other two later if the first batch worked out well.
"Three reels?"
"Yeah. 16 millimeter."
"Sound?"
"No sound. One of 'em is in color and the other two are black and white."
"Good?"
"What do you think?"
Devereaux nodded. "I'd like to keep this picture," he said. "Okay?"
"It's a two dollar picture. You can have it for a buck."
Devereaux fished out an alligator wallet, found a single and handed it over. Jeff got a quick flash of a lot of money. For a moment he regretted collecting the dollar for the picture-maybe it made him look cheap. Then he changed his mind-it was better to look cheap than to look too anxious to make a sale. That was a sweet thing about the sex business. You didn't have to kiss the customers on then-rosy bottoms. They needed you more than you needed them. It was strictly a seller's market when it was sex you were laying on the line.
"You need more than movies," Jeff said suddenly.
"What else?"
"A place to show them. Or did you figure Mrs. Cadbury would go for turning the lodge into a theater?"
"Oh, Lord."
"There ought to be a way," Jeff said. "Don't worry."
"How?"
"I'll come up with something."
"Some place comfortable," Devereaux said. "I mean, people won't want to sit in folding chairs while they watch."
"I know."
"They'll want to be comfortable." God, Jeff thought. "They'll want to bang each other," he said. "Right?"
"Uh-"
"Don't worry about a thing," he said.
Devereaux nodded. His hand went to his pocket. He wanted to look at the still again, Jeff thought. But the wallet had been nice and fat, and it wasn't stuffed with a mess of singles, either. Devereaux and his bunch of abnormals could turn out to be properly profitable if he played his cards right. And there was no reason to play them wrong.
Devereaux said: "How much?"
"For the movies?"
"Uh-huh."
Jeff thought a moment. "Three reels and the projector and someone to run it," he said. "They'd have to get about three hundred."
"Three hundred?"
"Uh-huh?"
"Man, that's a hell of a lot. That's about three times what I figured."
"Well," Jeff said, "it comes high."
They settled on two and a quarter, plus whatever the rental cost on the "theater" might run. "That gives you an absolute top of three hundred," Jeff said. "Probably less, if things work out right. I'll need a hundred of that two and a quarter now."
Devereaux gave it to him.
"Fine," Jeff said. "Now I can make arrangements." There weren't really any arrangements to make, he thought, since he already had films and projector tucked in the Chevy's trunk. But he wanted that hundred ahead of time anyway, just in case Devereaux decided to cop out later on. You never went wrong taking cash in advance. If you already bad the money in your hot little band, nobody could stiff you. The Dayton fence had taught him that, and he had learned it and remembered it.
He counted the money quickly-five twenties can be counted without much trouble-and folded the bills and tucked them into his pocket. "Let's see," he said, "when do you want the showing?"
"What's today?"
"Tuesday."
"How's Friday night? Too soon for you?"
"I can swing it," Jeff said.
Devereaux went away. Jeff closed his eyes, stretched out under the warm embrace of the sun. The money just kept rolling in, he thought. So sweet and so very easy. A theater would be a cinch to arrange, too-just find some farmer with a barn and rent the barn for the evening for ten or twenty bucks, no questions asked. And then tell Devereaux the rental was fifty, which would sound reasonable enough. And pick up thirty or forty more that way.
And the best part of it, he thought, was that nobody would lose on the deal Some farmer would get an extra ten or twenty bucks, and he himself would make a pile, and the gang of raunchy little wife-swappers would see three nice hot reek and get so excited they would chase each other all over the barn.
And there was a little added kick, too. He was going to run that projector himself naturally He would get to see the films And, more important than that, he would get to see the audience.
Charles Turner dropped his cigarette on the ground and squashed it underfoot. He took a deep breath of air He'd had his invitation now. That Dan Purlie. the one with the wife who made you want to grab out wildly, had invited him.
"Get a girl." Purlie had said. "We've got no aversion to unmarried couples. Get a girl and we'll have a ball." And. with a sly wink: "Wait until you get into Gwen. If I say so myself, she's one hell of a piece."
These were his kind of people, he thought. He turned and headed toward the lodge, covering the short distance quickly, clambering up onto the porch and lowering himself into a rocker. He rocked diligently, imagining the way it would be. Somebody else's wife any time he wanted her for the rest of the wild summer. Sue Fallon, Betty Devereaux, Gwen Purlie-all of them hot as candles and built like bombs and ready to go like rabbits.
And, according to Purlie, there were big things in store. Purlie didn't exactly spell it out-he was inclined to be subtle about some things, if not about his wife's ability in the rack. But it sounded as though they were planning some kind of orgy over the weekend, something with movies or something like that.
Turner was beginning to sense a tremendous capacity within himself for sexual excess. He had never known of it before. He knew he was a sensual person, a man given to i heating on his wife, but he had never thought of himself as ... well, depraved.
Now he wasn't so sure. He was having a lot of sex, most but not all of it provided by the bellhop. He was getting it steady, and he was enjoying a wide variety, and it seemed that each piece he cut off only served to sharpen his appetite for the bizarre. It was almost as though he wanted to reach out with both hands-among other things-and grab onto all the loving in the world in whatever form it might be available.
He was becoming more and more of a lustful man, more and more of a sinner. And he liked it that way.
He rocked back and forth, smoking the cigarette and thinking. The first thing he had to do was fairly simple. He had to get a girl, and not a whore. Someone at the lodge. But all the women there were married, and they all had husbands who were already using them as trading material, and-
Then it came to him. He couldn't use a guest as his partner, but that didn't knock him out of the running. He could use one of the employees. Now who?
Of course.
Mary Lou Timmel. The chambermaid, the nymphy one. He had copped a feel or two of those stunning breasts now and then, and he had liked what he had copped, and he knew the girl was a nymph if there was one ever. Obviously, this girl would be perfect. She was a type who took sex where she could find it and enjoyed all she could get of it. The idea of joining the wife-swapping circle should appeal to her. It meant a steady source of sex to her, which was something she would be glad to have, but it also meant a great deal more of that. It meant a venture into the bizarre and the perverse.
It meant that for Charles, too. The simple idea of making that person's wife with that person's full knowledge and consent was much better. And the idea of an orgy, where married couples tossed partners back and forth and made love under each other's eyes-that was magnificent. It thrilled him.
And it would have a comparable effect on Mary Lou. He was sure it would.
He went looking for the girl. He looked around outside, and he looked around the lodge, and he looked all over the damned place, and he looked in vain. He couldn't find the chesty little tramp. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn't find her. He spent a long time looking, and he still didn't find her, and he gave up in disgust and went to his room.
And there she was. She was a chambermaid, after all. and she was supposed to make beds, and that was what she was doing. She was making his bed. He walked into the room and there she was, her profile impressive, her body bent over, her bottom twitching temptingly.
He closed the door and coughed throatily. She spun around, surprised.
He jumped her.
And afterward, while she lay on her back panting for breath and sighing and telling him what a wonderful way he had found to surprise her, he gave her the whole story.
"Wife-swapping," she said.
He nodded.
"I don't know," she said. "Are you sure they'll let us in? Or will we have to get married?"
He laughed. "I'm sure they'll let us in. And you don't have to worry-they won't make us get married."
"Orgies," she said.
"That's right."
"God," she said. "Gee, I used to just be a tramp, sort of. But this summer is really doing things to me. I'm turning into a real pervert instead of just a tramp."
"Well?"
She rolled over onto her side. He put one hand on her breast and put the other hand at her legs. He cupped the hand and clutched her and she started to breathe hard again. He extended one finger and wiggled it and she gasped.
"Oh, do me," she said.
"Do you want to join the club?"
"Oh, yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes. But come on. Come on. sugar, come on. baby, come on and do me!"
"Sure," he said. He wiggled his finger again, just to keep her in the mood.
Then he did her.
He did her fiercely, violently. It most have hurt her a great deal but she never objected. She didn't seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to like it.
Ora Cadbury was happy. She was going to be rich, and that sort of thing always made a person happy, especially when being rich was the person's primary goal in life. Ora Cadbury walked around the lodge, passed the bridge game between the Fallons and the Devereaux's, who no more seemed to tire of bridge than they did of each other's spouses. She passed Rich Cameron and Gwen Purlie, the two sitting side-by-side on the couch, with the Purlie woman's hand doing un-likely things in Cameron's lap. Probably trying to get him to join their little gang, Ora thought. She wondered if his red-headed wife would go for it. Probably not, she decided.
She wandered out to the porch, took a bottle away from her sleeping husband, then went back inside the lodge again.
She was going to be rich.
This season, Cadbury's would make money. Not a fortune, although it would be the best season so far, and by a long shot. But the place would make money.
Next year they would make a fortune.
Because next year the word would be out. If yon wanted sex, plain or fancy, straight or simple, Cadbury's Lodge was the place to get it. If you wanted other women or other men, if you wanted orgies or depravity, Cadbury's was your home away from home. If you were a sick and twisted individual who went through life on the trail of an overactive libido, you were Cadbury's material and Cadbury's was for you. If you had a dirty mind in a dirty body, you belonged on the scenic shores of Lake Champlain.
And there were a lot of people like that. And they would all come calling.
And she would make a fortune.
It actually excited her. It became a physical thing, reaching for her. tearing at her All that money coming in. all that sex going on-the overall effect was aphrodisiacal.
She needed it.
She wanted it.
Ached for it.
Had to have it.
But, damn it, she was at that awkward age. Men weren't going to make heavy passes at her, nor could she get along without it. And her husband-whom she had decided to unload over the winter, incidentally, since his only asset now was his name and she could retain it after she had dumped him-her husband wasn t worth a thing. One piece all summer, and only because she sweated and slaved to excite him, and even then he couldn't do very well.
She couldn't do anything with a guest It was all right to run a place that was a monument to depravity, but the innkeepers had to keep herself above suspicion. She wasn't too well fitted for the Calpurnia role, either.
She was too hot to carry it off. She needed a piece in the worst way, and a piece would make everything all right again, and she would be able to enjoy all the money and everything else.
So?
Oh, of course. There was an answer after all, by God. Because, when all was said and done, she could certainly call the shots around the place when it was a place that she owned and managed. Why, if she could go into the kitchen and tell one of the kitchen boys to bang a hyperthyroid typist from the Bronx then she could just as easily tell him to put the blocks to her, couldn't she? She could. Easily.
Lord, it wasn't like the old days. You never appreciate your youth, she thought philosophically. Back in the old days, the not-so-long-ago-at-that days, when she had whored magnificently in Newport, she had had all the men in the world anxious to bed down with her. And, whore that she was, she hadn't appreciated it at all. The money was good, but she was too whorish in her heart to relax entirely and enjoy the sweet warm feeling of a man inside her.
Now, she could easily enjoy it.
She walked into the kitchen. Kenny, the happy sailor who still walked as though he wasn't used to dry land, was slicing things up for a stew. She smiled sweetly at him. He smiled back hesitantly. She crooked a finger. He came, followed her out of the kitchen.
"I need your services," she said.
"Yeah?"
"A woman who needs a young man," she said. "Not one of those secretarial types. An older woman."
"I don't mind," Kenny said. "Right now," she said. "Sure."
She looked at him, thinking that she would bet he was hung like a bull elephant She hoped so. "I'm supposed to bring you to her," she told him. "I'm supposed to take you to her room."
"Good enough. What's she look like?"
"It don't matter much. I'm kind of in the mood, anyway.
Ora Cadbury smiled. "Shell give you twenty dollars," she said. "Just as an added incentive to do a good job."
"Sure."
She led him up the stairs and down the corridor to her room. She opened the door. He went inside. She followed him and drew the door shut.
"Hey," he said, "where the hell is she?"
"She's here."
"Yeah but where?"
"Right behind you."
He turned and stared at her. He wasn't very bright, she thought, because it took a few seconds for light to break in his eyes. But it didn't matter whether he was bright or not, not really. Just so he was both large and durable. That was all that mattered.
"You," he said.
"That's right."
"God," he said.
She took off all her clothes. He watched her for a moment, unsure of himself, unsure of what to do next. Somehow this gaucherie served as an added fillip to her passion. And, when he was undressed, she saw that everything was in greater proportions than she had expected. There was no reason for her to be disappointed.
She had to do the leading, but that was fine. She led him to the bed and drew him down onto it. Her breasts were heaving and her loins were throbbing and her mouth was moist with saliva. She felt his young skin under her hands.
She guided his hands to her breasts, then rolled on the bed with her eyes closed and her mouth open while he did wonderful things to her. When she tired of this she guided his hands elsewhere and he did the things he was supposed to do.
Then she hauled him upon her, guiding Grommet A into Floristarsis B, and the world began to spin like a top. She was paying him twenty dollars for this, and he was earning every penny of it, and she felt just as happy as the men who had visited her when she was a young and nubile whore in Newport.
CHAPTER NINE
"I don't get it," Kathy said. "That's all. I just don't get it. Everything was working fine and now-"
"I thought I explained."
Kathy drew a breath, then looked at Mary Lou carefully. That was the trouble with being gay, she thought. And the trouble with trying to make a nympho into a converted dyke. You kept hitting these little snags.
"I was explaining," Mary Lou said. "Charlie-that's Mr. Turner, the one who his wife went off and he's staying-"
"I know who he is."
"Oh. Well, anyway, there's this group. All these couples, the Devereauxs and the Fallons and all these others, and Charlie and I are joining them. We're going to trade wives."
"You don't have a wife," Kathy said reasonably "And Turner's wife isn't around, so how can he trade her?"
"I mean he's going to trade me."
"Huh?"
"I'm his partner."
"In crime?"
"In sex, sort of. He's going to trade me, and I get to sleep with the other men while he sleeps with their wives."
"Where are you going to do this? In church?"
"Huh?"
"Oh, forget it," Kathy said. "So you're running out on me? You and I had a lot of fun together, honey. And you know I'm not possessive, either. I don't care what men you sleep with. I don't give a damn, just so I get a shot at you now and then."
"But-"
She reached for the girl, drew her closer. It was night and they were in the same room together and a bed loomed invitingly, and Kathy couldn't take it. The girl had been so goddamn unbelievably great in the rack, and Kathy had managed to seduce her magnificently, and now she was copping out and taking up with some man so he could trade her off to other men. If she wanted to do that, fine. But why couldn't she still play gay girl now and then? It didn't make a goddamn particle of sense.
"I still don't get it," she said. "What's the matter with me? I don't have bad breath, do I?"
"No, but-"
"Underarm odor?"
"No. Kathy-"
"Then what in hell is wrong with me?"
"It just wouldn't be right," Mary Lou said. Kathy stared at her. If the booby thing was going moral on her, now, wouldn't that be one for the books? She would sleep with all the men in the world, and she would play wife-swap without even being married-a travesty of social mores if there ever was one-but she was drawing the line at dykery-and after she had already been there before
"It just wouldn't be right," Mary Lou repeated. "You see. I made an agreement."
"With who?"
"With Charlie. You see, in this group that you've got, this wife-swapping group-"
"I know what group you're talking about."
"Well. In this group, they have certain rules. You can't just sleep around at random. You have to go just for the other people in the group. That way there's no cheating. Just good group participation."
Light dawned. "Then it isn't because I'm a girl," Kathy said.
"No, not at all."
"You can only put out for guys in the group-that's it?"
"Uh-huh."
"Oh, Lord," Kathy said.
She was still standing there and shaking her head in disbelief when Mary Lou excused herself and left the room. It was a pretty staggering concept, and only the fundamental candor of one Mary Lou Timmel kept her from thinking that the large-chested, fatheaded girl was lying.
Mary Lou wasn't lying though. Mary Lou barely knew how to lie, as far as that went. Mary Lou was very obviously telling the truth, and that was what made everything so remarkable.
As far as Kathy could see, there was no activity on earth quite so abnormal as wife-swapping. No matter how you analyzed it, here was the ultimate denial of morality, its amoral qualities reinforced by the fact that it made promiscuity a social grace and invested it with trappings and ceremony. If a person sinned by virtue of being overcome by impossible desires, that was one thing. If he took sin for granted and sinned in accordance with by-laws and a formal constitution, that was something entirely different.
And that was exactly what the wife-swapping set was doing. You-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours had been illogically translated into you-bang-my-wife-while-I-bang-yours, and no matter how you might twist that one around you would have trouble making it come up in accordance with Judaeo-Christian morality in any of its customary forms.
The whole thing was crazy. Crazy. Stark raving mad, by God. And the worst part of it, the truly horrible part of it, was the effect it was having on one Kathy Mills. Here she was, as ready to go as a thoroughbred at the starting gate, and here was Mary Lou, putting out for almost everyone on earth but her. It wouldn't have been as bad if she hadn't already found out what a ball it was to make it with Mary Lou. But she had, and she was dying for a return match, and the girl wouldn't go for it Phooey, she thought-Double phooey.
She might just as well have never seduced Mary Lou in the first place. Oh, there were some pleasant memories, some bits and pieces that she would not forget for quite awhile.
Kathy sighed. Here she was-once again the only dyke in Vermont, all alone with no place to go and nobody to do. Everybody else in the place had really perverted desires, and she was just a plain old simple old lesbian. And everybody else got all the love they could possibly want, and she got nothing.
It was hell.
Wait a minute, she thought There might be a way after all. If any guest wanted anything, all he had to do was go to that bellhop, that Jeff Baylor, and lay money on the line and get value in return. And she was willing to pay for it She had some money saved up, and she couldn't think of a better thing to spend it on.
She went looking for Jeff Baylor. She found him, and she told him that there was something she needed. He asked her what it was.
"I want someone to sleep with," she said.
He clucked his tongue. "I usually peddle girls," he said calmly. "But I suppose I can find a guy. Hell, will I do? I won't even charge you, baby."
She lowered her eyes. "You don't understand," she said. "I don't want a man. I want a girl."
When he didn't say anything for several minutes she raised her eyes slowly and saw his face. He did not seem shocked, not really. He was just studying her calmly, appraising her, his eyes shrewd and calculating. While he measured her with his eyes she felt herself fall apart inside. He was the only one at Cadbury's who knew about her now, aside from Mary Lou. And she had the sudden feeling that it would be better if he didn't know. You didn't give a person like Jeff a hold over you. There was far too great a chance that he would decide to use it, to apply a little pressure to a sensitive nerve-ending or two just to see what would happen.
"Well," he said.
She took a deep breath.
"Hell, I should of guessed. Gay, huh?"
"Isn't it obvious now?"
"Uh-huh. I suppose so. What kind of a girl do you want?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Just so long as she's got the right equipment, huh?" He sighed. "You're in luck, baby. I've got a girl in mind."
"Good."
"But it'll cost you."
"How much?"
"Thirty."
She argued. He settled on twenty, which she thought was probably a good deal too much but she didn't feel like haggling any more. He said he would have the girl come over. Then he went away, and she went back to the room to wait for Jeff's whore to arrive.
So weak, she thought to herself. So weak, so very weak, so horribly weak. We're all junkies, she told herself. We're all hooked on one kick or another, and the need for it can make us hurt ourselves all over the place. We're all so goddamned weak.
Then she thought about the whore he would send over, and what she would do to the whore and what she would make the whore do to her. That was one nice thing about having to pay for it. You got to call the shots, got to have everything your own way. She thought about this, planning and imagining, and she forgot all about being hooked and only thought how very warm she was.
Marilyn Cameron was trembling. Her hands were shaking visibly and she could not control them. Her skin was prickly with goose-flesh, her heart shook in her rib cage, and beads of cold sweat dotted her high forehead.
"I just don't understand it," she was saying. "I just don't understand it at all."
Rich smiled at her. "There's nothing to understand"
"You want us to-"
"To join the group."
"With all those perverts-"
"Not perverts," he said gently. "Just a few married couples who like to enjoy life to the hilt."
"Oh, God."
His smile widened. "Why, you'll like it," he said, a hint of savagery under the sugary tenderness. "Think of all the men you'll get to squeeze your thighs around. And think how impressed they'll be when they realize that red hair of yours is the real thing. And that birthmark-"
"Rich-"
"You know the one I mean. That sexy little birthmark on the underside of your left boob. That ought to send them. Remember how it got me when I first saw it?"
She couldn't say anything. There was so much about this man, this husband of hers, that she just did not know at all. At times-and these was of course one of those times-she did not understand him at all. He was too complex for her to keep up with. She tried to tell herself that this man who wanted her to join in with the perverted little games of the perverted little crowd was not the man she had married, not the man she lived with, not the man she loved.
But that was not true. He was the same man, and she had to admit as much to herself. He was Rich-and the contradictions which formed his personality were ones which she would have to discover and accept. She did not know him, not fully. He was not easy to know. But he was Rich, and for better or worse she knew she loved him.
"Rich," she said.
He looked at her.
"Can I ask you a few things?"
"Go ahead."
"Do you ... do you want these other women?"
"Yes "
"You do?"
"Yes."
She swallowed. "All right," she said. "I guess I can accept that. I ... yes, I can understand that. But doesn't it bother you that I'll be having sex with other men?"
"No."
"I'm your wife. Doesn't the idea of me doing ... doing things quite openly with other men, doesn't it make you upset?"
"No."
"It doesn't bother me at all." he said. "You know what it does? If anything, it excites me." She stared at him.
"Yes," he said thoughtfully, "it excites me. And do you know what I'd really love to do? I'd like to watch you."
"With another man?"
"Yes."
"How could you-"
"I'd like that," he said. "You-my wife-with your legs as far apart as they can go, and some guy between them slamming into you until you can't see straight. Damn it, that's something I'd like to see."
She thought for a moment that she was going to be sick to her stomach. Her head was swimming in green ink and her heart was hammering irregularly and her stomach was queasy and she wanted to go somewhere dark and throw up. How could he talk to her like this? And it wasn't as though he was teasing her. He was being completely frank and candid with her, completely open. He meant all the horrible things he was saying to her, meant them quite truthfully. That was the worst part of it. She knew very well that he wasn't kidding.
"Come on," he said. "It's all arranged. You met Phil and Sue Fallon, didn't you?"
She didn't answer.
"We're trading with them," he went on. "You get Phil and I get Sue."
At least that much was normal, she thought. The way things were going, he might have wanted Phil for himself, and might have wanted her to go with Sue. And it made almost as much sense to her that way as the other way.
No sense.
None at all.
He walked toward her, reached out his arms for her. Surprisingly, she found herself rushing to him and burying her face in his chest. His arms closed around her and held her. He patted her head and rubbed the back of her neck and told her that everything was going to be all right.
"It'll work out, baby."
"Oh, Rich-"
"You'll have a good time with Phil. You'll show him what a sweet one you are, baby."
"God-"
"Go one," he said. "The Fallons are in Room 314. Go there and tell Sue to come on up." He winked at her. "Be good to Phil," he said. "And when you come back maybe I'll have a little stuff saved up for you."
Later, she never remembered walking to the Fallons room. She sort of floated down the hallway, moving along mechanically and mindlessly, a prisoner on the route to the chair. Then suddenly she was there, knocking on the door of Room 314.
Sue Fallon opened the door, winked hugely at her. "Have a good time with Phil," the woman said. "I'm going to see if that husband of yours is as wild a stud as he looks."
And Sue passed by her and closed the door. And Phil was there, stirring a pair of martinis and presenting one of them to her. She took it and sipped it.
"Well," he said
"Oh."
"You're one hell of a beautiful woman," he said. "I got a lech for you the minute you and Rich checked in."
"Look," she said. "Something wrong?"
She swallowed, then nodded. "I never did this before," she said.
He started laughing hysterically. She gaped at him.
Then he broke off the laughter and apologized. "It's just that line sounded so funny," he explained. "Like a virgin just as she's getting ready to put out for the first time. Look, you're not a virgin, are you?"
"Hardly."
"Then there's no sweat. See? You're not crossing any big bridge. You ever sleep with anyone besides Rich?"
"Never."
"Ever want to?"
"No."
"Not a bit?"
"No," she said, honestly.
He nodded. "Then all you have to do is revise your attitude," he explained. "You've got the All-American monogamous attitude-one man and one woman balling one another till death do them part. It may look good on paper and sound good in church, but it certainly limits things. What you have to realize is that you can be every bit as deeply in love with Rich and still enjoy a roll in the rack with another guy."
"I don't see how."
"Baby," he said languorously, "get set for a demonstration."
At first the demonstration didn't affect her. He undressed her, his hands skillful and clever. He undressed himself. At first she couldn't look at him. She was never embarrassed that way with Rich-she loved to see his nakedness and have him look at her own bare flesh. But now she was embarrassed. She closed her eyes and she wished the lights were out.
"God," he said. "I thought you dyed your hair."
"I don't"
"Yeah, I can see that. That's a pretty shade." She didn't say anything. "Soft too. Sort of silky."
Before, she had thought that the caresses of another man could not possibly have an effect upon her. But Phil Fallon's hands were exceptionally adroit. He touched her, here and there and everywhere, and bit by bit and inch by inch and particle by particle and degree by degree she felt her good woman's body warming to his touch and responding to his caresses.
When he caressed her firm, pink nipples, she quivered all over with lustful joy. When he found the birthmark on the underside of one breast and attacked it she felt passion flowing through her body. When his fingers did something wonderful she reached for him with sweaty hands and held him tight, pitching his passion as high as her own, higher and higher and higher.
And when he entered her, his chest crushing down upon her quivering breasts and his body snug and sweet between her thighs, the first thing she thought was that he was different from Rich. She analyzed all the little points of difference, remembering how it was with Rich and comparing how it was with Phil. But these thought processes stopped soon enough.
Because now she was caught up in it, swinging with it, writhing and twisting and bucking with it, bucking and ducking and other rhyming verbs, going wilder and wilder and wilder. He was inside her and she was around him and the bed buckled with the liquid fury of their animal lust.
Faster.
Deeper.
More-
And more and more and more, and this was not Rich but someone else, and right now Rich was doing it to this man's wife, and she thought of that and quivered with the thought, and her back was arched and her body swam in sweat and her arms held him and her legs gripped him and it came faster and faster and faster and deeper and deeper and deeper until she thought he would stab into her heart, and more and more and more-And then, finally, peace.
It took her fifteen minutes to catch her breath By that time he wanted to do it again, and this time he didn't have to seduce her. This time she was all for it.
Jeff drove the Chevy slowly. The car was headed toward Vergennes. Sara was sitting next to him, ten fresh dollars in her purse. He had a fresh ten-spot in his wallet. And, back at the lodge, a girl named Kathy Mills would have considerably less trouble falling asleep than if she had held onto her twenty bucks.
Jeff shrugged his shoulders. You never knew, he thought. Here he had had the Mills broad pegged as a compulsive virgin, and all along she was a secret dyke. Hell, you could never tell. You just never knew. Here he had written her off as sexless, and now she had asked him to find her a lesbian playmate.
He hadn't figured on getting Sara for her. Marge was the one who came to mind, since Marge was the one who had insisted she would do anything in the world for a couple of bucks. But Marge was on a once-a-month vacation-he found that out as soon as he called her up-and that left Linda and Sara, and Linda was turning a trick in another resort where Jeff had arranged things with a mercenary if unimaginative bellhop, so that left Sara.
And Sara was glad to oblige.
He reached over and patted the kid on the thigh. "Well," he said. "How did it go?"
"I was fine."
"You didn't mind it?"
"Of course not," she said. "I mean, it doesn't make any difference to me. You do pretty much the same things with a girl or a boy, I guess."
"Were you ever with a girl before?"
"No."
God, he thought, what an adaptable little slut she was. Nothing affected the kid. It was a shame he couldn't drag her along to the orgy, he thought. Maybe he could ring her in to help him with the projector, then play little games with her while the show went on. He thought it over and decided not to bother. It would require a little explanation, for one thing. It would take his mind off the business at hand, for another. And, moreover, it would keep him from concentrating on the activity of the various couples that would be watching the movies.
Because he had managed to figure out something. The more you knew about people's sexual peculiarities, the more of a stranglehold you had on them. No information of that nature could ever be completely useless. Whether it enabled you to sell them something, or to blackmail them, or whatever, it always paid off. Sooner or later, for example, he would figure out a valuable use for the information that Kathy Mills was a lesbian. Sooner or later he would figure out uses for all sorts of knowledge.
"Say," he said. "What did she want you to do?"
"Things."
He looked at Sara out of the comer of his eye. "Like what, for instance?"
"Oh, you know."
"If I knew, would I ask?"
"Oh," she said. "Well, what do you want me to do to tell you?"
"Everything."
"Everything we did?"
"Uh-huh. The whole bit."
He drove, with one hand on the wheel and the other hand on her plump little thigh, and she told him. She would have made an excellent writer. She started with the moment she entered Kathy's room and she didn't leave out a thing. Every little nuance of lesbian behavior found its place in her story.
After awhile, Jeff's hand left her thigh, settled on her shoulder, hovered there, then dove into her blouse. It found a breast and played games with the breast. The Chevy slowed down. He was driving a steady twenty miles an hour, he had long ago bypassed Vergennes, and he was tweaking Sara's sweet little nipple while she told him, in photographic form, just what she had done for Kathy Mills.
All of this had an effect upon Jeff. When you are driving along with a hot little whore, tweaking her nipple while she tells you about a recent love-bout with a girl, it gets to you. One of two things happens-either you get all hot and bothered, or you talk back to her in the high-pitched voice of a man who was castrated in early childhood. Jeff had not been castrated in early childhood. Or since.
He got all hot and bothered.
But he had long ago mastered the technique of being hot and learned. With a lot of girls, the best way to paradise was to want them intensely without letting the intensity of your desire show through. If you didn't want them much, of course, you didn't get them. But if you slobbered and panted all over the place, you turned them off, and that was no good either.
At Clifton, back in the pre-expulsion days, he had discovered the value of this approach. There was this one girl that everyone was crazy to make and that no one could manage to score with, and it was the same story everywhere. Guys took her out and necked with her and felt her up and got hot as stoves, and then she copped a plea and wouldn't come across.
Jeff took up the challenge. He dated her, and he necked with her and felt her up, but he was always the one to stop. He managed to seem a little bored, and quite immovable in a Gibraltarian way. And, after a while, he became the challenge for the girl. She had to seduce him. Which was fine.
Now, though, there was no need for such subtlety. Sara went on with her filthy little story, moving from one climax to another, and Jeff let go of her nubby little nipple and withdrew his hand.
He unzipped his pants.
"You can stop talking now," he said.
Obediently, she stopped talking.
He smiled a sly smile. He put his hand on the back of her head, and slowly but firmly he guided her head to the place where he wanted it. Then he let go of her head and put both hands on the wheel. She stayed that way, with her head in his lap. He kept his eyes on the road ahead and drove the Chevy at a steady twenty miles an hour. The road was a curvy and hilly and bumpy affair, but that didn't hurt any.
She worked like a slave, a slave kneeling at the feet of her master. She worked industriously, and he kept his eyes on the road and smiled his sly smile.
She wasn't talking now.
She couldn't But he didn't need her conversation for excitement, because she was doing a marvellous job as it was.
CHAPTER TEN
Friday night. At six-thirty, Jeff got into Chevy and drove four miles down a winding country road to Hexline's barn. Hexline was a farmer who raised trefoil, living alone in an old farmhouse and cultivating his own garden, along with his trefoil. Two days ago, Jeff had asked Hexline if he could rent the barn for the evening. He offered ten dollars for the rental.
"Ayeh," Hexline had said. "What do you want it for?"
"For ten dollars," Jeff said patiently. "Ayeh. But for what?"
"For private things," Jeff told him. "That's why you get ten instead of five."
"Ayeh," said Hexline, "That's why I get twenty instead of ten, boy."
"Right," Jeff said.
Now, as he drove the Chevy to the door of the barn, Jeff decided that the place had been a perfect choice. It was far away from the rest of the world, high on a hill with no one close by. Hexline's farmhouse was down the road a piece, and Hexline had solemly sworn to stay far from the barn that night. God alone knew what the old farmer thought was going on in his barn, but for twenty bucks he was willing to swing with his imagination instead of determining the real state of events.
He got out of the car, walked around to the trunk, unlocked it and opened it. The projector and the five reels were still there, fortunately. He took the projection equipment inside, then brought the three reels in and locked the other two reels in the car's trunk. He closed the bam door, got back into the Chevy, and drove back slowly to Cadbury's Lodge.
That afternoon, he and Ora Cadbury had worked things out to their mutual satisfaction. It had become quite obvious to Jeff that any time devoted to bell hopping duties was costing him money, but at the same time he was unwilling to give up the front. But they had worked things out. Ora Cadbury agreed that he was to be discharged from all bellhop duties, while remaining an official member of the staff. He agreed to waive the two hundred and fifty dollars which he was supposed to be paid for the summer. He would continue in an ex-officio capacity, supplying their unsupplyable wants.
That was a good thing to have settled, he realized. Because the money was rolling in from all sides now, any job which kept him locked to one location was costing him a lot of bread. Now he could roam around at will, could tighten up and expand his organization, and could get things moving on a big scale. By the time the summer ended, he would have more money than he had even hoped for.
And that wasn't all. The three whores-Sara and Marge and Linda-were crazy about the system he had inaugurated. They would follow him wherever he went. The bellhops who worked with him in other hotels and resorts were falling into line all the way. Whatever organization he ultimately worked up, a lot of the sharper ones would want to be a part of it. Bit by bit, weirdly enough, he was actually organizing his own mob.
He headed back to the Lodge. Movie time, he thought. Now all the little perverts could get their jollies.
He grinned.
Turner still hadn't gotten around to buying a car. He and Mary Lou drove out to the barn with Gwen and Dan Purlie. The Purlies sat in front, with Dan driving. He and Mary Lou sat in the back.
So far, he thought, everything had been magnificent. Since he and Mary Lou had joined the "club" as unmarried young marrieds, he had had a taste of some of the most spectacular women on God's green earth. Gwen Purlie, sit-nng beside her husband in the front, had warmed his bed recently and had taught him a way to do it that absolutely knocked you out. Sue Fallon had brought to his bed the only hreasts in captivity that could give Mary Lou a run for her money, and Betty Devereaux had been willing and luscious. Only that new redhead, that Marilyn Cameron, remained untasted.
Soon, he thought. Probably that very night he would get into Marilyn Cameron, in one way or another. The Fallons, the Purlies, the Devereauxs, the Camerons-and he and Mary Lou. Five wild couples on a sleigh ride of sin, watching pornographic movies and then putting on a little pornographic show of their own.
Great.
Wild.
Wheeee-
It wasn't just the sex that turned him on. It was the whole idea of the orgy, the depravity, all of it. That got to him. Face it, he thought-one woman was rather like another woman, and one position wasn't a hell of a lot different from another position, and although you might never get tired of doing it you could not always approach the same thing with the same initial burst of enthusiasm.
But when the sex got wilder and wickeder as you went along, then things really got going. Add a touch of perversity, a dash of sadomasochism, a voyeuristic sauce, a sprig of healthy exhibitionism, a little bit of latent faggishness, a few drops of troilism, and you had something worth fooling around with. And there was no limit when you had a bunch of hot-to-trot passionate people, you could keep getting farther and farther out, driving on to new kicks every time the mixture seemed lacking in spice. There was no sexual insipidity, not as long as people had any imaginative material in their heads, or in their groins, or wherever.
He gave Mary Lou a little squeeze. Now that was another thing-he had been banging these other broads, and Mary Lou had been giving value in return to their husbands, but they hadn't done anything genuinely orgiastic yet. Now what would be really great would be if he could bang some broad while the husbands was ramming it into Mary Lou, with both of them (both couples, that is, or all four of them) in the same room, so that they could all watch each other. Now that had possibilities.
He stuck his hand up Mary Lou's skirt. He pinched her, and she gave a little moan.
It was going to be a hell of a good night.
The Cameron car pulled up in front of the barn, the last in the four-car caravan. Rich pulled up the handbrake and killed the motor. He opened his door, got out, walked around the car and opened the door for Marilyn. She stepped out gingerly and filled her lungs with air that smelled just slightly of cow manure.
The barn was gray and weather-beaten, with a Chew Mail Pouch sign fading to nothingness on one side. Inside, the cow-crap smell was just a little stronger, but not bad enough to be objectionable The barn was large, with the floor liberally covered with heaps of straw-an idea of Jeff's which met with approval from all sides. People had seated themselves at random in front of the large screen which Jeff had set up at one end of the barn. Rich moved into the crowd and found a seat. Marilyn hesitated, wanting to sit next to him but knowing he wanted to be alone. She drew another fecal breath, sighed heavily, and sat down next to Dan Purlie.
Jeff Baylor closed the doors. He turned off the barn's single lightbulb. It was time.
At first the place was pitch-black, but of course the old barn was not remotely light-tight, and in a few seconds, Marilyn's eyes grew accostomed to the dark. She glanced around the musty barn, saw men and women with their hands on one another or their bodies close together. She saw one woman, Betty Devereaux, remove her blouse to facilitate action. God, she thought.
It was hell. Everything was hell. She was playing the game, doing it with the men, even enjoying it. And all the time she was hating Rich for what he had made her do, hating the men for what they were doing to her, hating herself most of all for enjoying every minute of it. It was getting so that the sex was tremendously necessary to her, because only in the throes of forbidden sexual pleasure could she get away temporarily from the guilt that those forbidden pleasures instilled in her brain.
So that made it a vicious sort of a circle with no way out, none at all. Things got worse and worse, and she was more passionate now and more perverse now with each passing day or night, and there was no way to escape from it, and each day the wash of guilt came at her stronger and stronger. And now she was here, ready to watch a dirty movie and to participate in a wild and horrid orgy. God-
She broke off her thought-train. The movie was starting. And, tramp that she was, she didn't want to miss it
Title: DO IT AGAIN, DARLING
Movie opens with a shot of the interior of a drab room, furnished with a large bed and a small chest of drawers. A door opens and two girls come through it. One is a blonde, the other a brunette. The brunette wears a skirt, tight on her wide hips, and a sweater that hugs her oversized breasts. The blonde is taller and somewhat more slender, and wears a quilted housecoat.
Subtitle: I WAS LONELY WITHOUT YOU, MARCIA.
The blonde, who had just said she was lonely, throws out her arms to embrace the brunette. They kiss mouth-to-mouth. The blonde steps back, then suddenly throws open the housecoat. The camera dollies in, panning her body from her shoulders to her knees. Her breasts, large and well-shaped, have a slight sag to them. An appendectomy scar mars her stomach. She parts her thighs, finally, so that the camera may dolly in for an extreme close-up.
Subtitle: TAKE YOUR CLOTHES OFF DARLING.
The brunette strips more slowly. However, since skirt and sweater are her only garments, the process does not take very long. The camera subjects her body to as close a scrutiny as it devoted to the body of the blonde. The brunette is built a little better, though. Her breasts are prettier without the sag. She, too, touches herself for the camera's benefit.
Subtitle: NOW LET'S HAVE A LITTLE PARTY.
The blonde leads the brunette to the unmade bed. The brunette lies down on the bed, and the blonde goes to the icebox and obtains two bananas. She gives one to the brunette and keeps the other. The two girls peel the bananas.
The brunette uses one on the blonde, and the blonde uses hers on the brunette. The camera pays a great deal of attention to this bizarre process.
Then the camera moves back for a shot of the blonde and the brunette sitting side-by-side on the edge of the bed. The two look tike a vaudeville sisters' act, both of them smiling sexily and holding a banana like Miss Liberty holding a torch. Together they close their eyes, open their mouths, and run their little pink tongues around their lips.
Then they devour the bananas.
Subtitle: NOW FOR THE REAL THING!
The camera follows them through the classic poses of lesbian love. They go from one bout of lovemaking to another, employing various extrapersonal objects in addition to the usual complement of hands and lips and tongues. The blonde and the brunette continue in this fashion, making wild love to the end of the reel.
Gwen Purlie was flaming. She was sitting in the front of the audience, with Rich Cameron on one side and Phil Fallon on the other. She was watching the blonde and the brunette on the screen and she was remembering things she hadn't thought about in years.
That summer between her second and third years at college. That girl-Rachel. The two of them, both lonely, both afraid of men and sex, both needing men and sex more than they realized.
Until one night-
That had been the first and last time Gwen had made it with a girl. It had shocked her as much as it had shocked Rachel, and though it had been good for both of them the ensuing guilt was greater than the physical pleasure. From that time on she had stuck to men, and lately there had been an ever-increasing number of men to stick to. But now, reminded so suddenly of the sweet deliciousness of lovemaking with Rachel, she was uncontrollably excited.
Hurriedly she peeled off her blouse. She was reaching around to unhook her bra, but someone sitting behind her-man or woman, she never found out-unhooked the bra for hw and reached around to give her boobs a quick and happy squeeze. She whispered thank you, then yanked her skirt down and off and tore off her panties.
Rich Cameron already had his hands on her. Phil Fallon, just a little slower, leaned over to work on her chunky breasts with his hands and mouth.
She reached for them. She unzipped Phil with her right hand and Rich with her left, and both of her hands reached in and came up with the object of her search. She held Phil in one hand and Rich in the other, and her hot little hands moved uncontrollably, and her breasts and loins quivered and throbbed in response to the caresses that the two men gave her.
And her eyes stayed on the screen.
She watched the little bit with the bananas. She watched the little thrill session on the bed. And her hands did things, and Phil and Rich did things, and her heart pounded and her body glowed and the three of them, all at once, reached the heights of ecstasy and gasped out their passion in unison.
Long ago, Jack Devereaux had taught his wife how they could make love without missing television. Betty Devereaux was a girl who had the memory of an elephant, especially for sexual matters. She had not forgotten the method.
Actually, it was a simple enough method. Dogs who have never been taught anything at all employ it frequently, and dogs rarely watch television anyway. But that is neither here nor there. It occurred to Betty, clever little girl that she was. that such a posture not only lent itself to the enjoyment of television but to the enjoyment of movies as well.
This was a movie she didn't want to miss. At the same time, she didn't want to miss out on an opportunity for sexual activity, especially in view of the stimulation which the movie afforded her. So her mind immediately selected this particular form of sex from the many possibilities stored under sex in her mental card-file, and that was that.
Now she was watching the movie. She was kneeling, and Charles Turner was sort of hovering over her from the rear like a stud dog over a bitch in heat (which she was really) and it was great. He had his hands on her boobs, too, and that made it just that much better, because in something like this the more you had going for you the better you felt.
Oh, lovely, Betty thought.
Ooooh!
And to think, she told herself, that there were days when she had sat in a balcony of a downtown show, watching a lousy old Audie Murphy western, and kissing a boy, and maybe doing a little discreet touching. And to think that she had found that sort of child's play thrilling.
Gosh.
She had come a long ways since then.
She had come a great many times since then.
And, by God, she was coming now!
The second real opens with an extreme close-up of a telephone. The telephone is on top of the small chest of drawers in the same room which served as the locus for the first reel.
Subtitle: TING-A-LING-A-LING!!
The camera moves back to show the two girls, the blonde and the brunette, lying exhausted in a heap of flesh on top of the bed. The blonde stirs, sits up, reaches for the telephone. She holds it to her ear with one hand while keeping the other hand on the brunette's breast. The blonde talks silently for a moment, replaces the receiver, and turns to the brunette.
Subtitle: THAT'S HARRY. HE WANTS TO COME OVER AND BANG ME. WE CAN HAVE A LOT OF FUN WITH HIM!
Shot of the brunette, hopping to her feet and hurry gaily to hide in the closet.
Subtitle: I'LL HIDE AND WE CAN SURPRISE HIM!
Seconds later, the blonde crosses to the door and opens it. She is still naked, not having donned a robe in which to welcome her visitor. The visitor, Harry, is a lean, wiry man with a great deal of body hair and a large bald spot on the top of his head. He comes inside and strips immediately-the film has decided by now that subtlety is no longer required. The camera pans Harry's body slowly, devoting the bulk of its time to his most vital asset, which is quite sizeable. The blonde is quite taken with his attribute of Harry's, and she goes to great lengths to show her enthusiasm for it. The camera watches, its jaundiced cyclopic eye taking in everything.
Subtitle: LET'S GO TO BED! The two get on the bed. There is a rather complex petting sequence in which a great many unorthodox routines and gimmicks are brought into play. Then the two make love m the most common manner known, with the camera an interested observer.
Shot of the brunette's face, peeping out of the closet.
Subtitle: I WISH I COULD GET INTO THE ACT!
The blonde and Harry, their enthusiasm to no degree abated, prepare to go another round. This time Harry lies on his back and the blonde straddles him. They begin to make love that way.
Shot of the closet door.
The brunette races into the room, naked and happy. She charges over to the bed and leaps up onto it.
Then, arms akimbo, she sits over Harry's face.
Jeff was not watching the movie.
From time to time, of course, he would glance at the screen. It was only natural, if only to determine where they were in the reel or to observe a particularly imaginative bit of lovemaking. But, for two reasons, he was not paying much attention to the film as it rolled on and on.
For one thing, he had already seen all five reels. The night before, he had picked up Linda, the whore, after she had finished turning a thirty-dollar trick at a hotel in Rutland, and he had driven her over to her house, and they had gone into her bedroom and had set up screen and projector and had watched all five reels, stopping the camera now and then to knock off a quickie. A pornographic movie, like a good book, is something you can return to time and time again, getting more from it each perusal. But he had just seen the film last night, and he wasn't crazy to see it again so soon.
That was one reason.
There was another.
The other was just as simple. He wasn't watching the movie because there were more interesting spectacles going on before his very orbs. Not filmed, either.
Live.
In color, sort of. Not bright color, because the barn was fairly dark. But live, definitely, and imaginative, and wild. And you weren't locked to one batch of action, either. Whenever one pair (or trio, or even foursome) of love-bugs began to bore you, you just switched to another group. And you went on like this, playing watch bird, and it was fairly wild.
Suddenly something occurred to him. These people in this barn were all pretty damned uninhibited this summer. They didn't care what they did or who they did it with or who knew about it.
But what were they like back home?
Pretty raunchy, he guessed. If they could swap wives so happily in the summer, they probably did much the same thing the rest of the year. But he was willing to bet that they were a lot more secretive about it back home. They had employers and friends and parents and relatives and children, and back in their own backyards they might act just as wildly but they wouldn't be nearly so open about it. They would keep it a secret.
Which gave him an idea.
They would pay. If he had something good on them, something that would hurt them, they would pay. It could be out-and-out blackmail or it could be some other sort of a push, but one way or the other it would pay off, and big. The Purlies seemed to have quite a bit of money, and the Fallons and the Devereauxs weren't exactly paupers. A little shove in the right direction and they would pay through the nose.
Pictures, he decided. A few good shots of one husband and one wife-married, of course, but not to each other-and he would have dynamite that could pay off. And there was still a lot of the summer left to go. There would be plenty of chances for that sort of thing, plenty of opportunities.
He broke off his thought then, because Dan Purlie was satisfying Mary Lou Timmel and Betty Devereaux simultaneously, and it was worth watching.
Marilyn Cameron didn't want him to do it that way. She knew it was going to hurt, and she didn't want to be hurt, and so she didn't want him to do it that way.
But Charles Turner was determined. He kept stroking her plump rump and telling her how nice it would be, and his hands were sure and his voice was persuasive, and she knew that she couldn't change his mind for him. Why not, she asked herself. She might as well go ahead with whatever he wanted. Everything had been sufficiently painful so fat, mentally if not physically, and a little physical pain might be quite in keeping with the overall tone of the evening's entertainment. It was not a pleasant evening, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was a deeply satisfying evening in terms or orgasm and tittillation, since she was being tittillated right and left and having one orgasm after the other. But this did not make for happiness now. Because there was a fitful sort of fury in everything she did and everything that happened to her, a raw sort of desperation that left her with the sure knowledge that, sooner or later, and probably sooner, something perfectly awful was going to happen to her.
So she didn't argue with Turner. She wasn't in favor of it, certainly, but she had given up arguing. And she knew inside that, much as it might hurt her, she would enjoy it. That knowledge was somehow horrible.
She crouched on her hands and knees, posing as he told her to pose. His hands came around her body and tugged savagely at her tender nipples and she moaned with sharp pain. His nails dug into her breasts and she stifled a scream.
Then his hands left her breasts and settled on her buttocks. He caressed the buttocks, then bent down behind her to kiss the plump fleshy hemispheres with lips and tongue. His hands resumed their activity, cupping her buttocks, squeezing them, pressing them together, parting them, pressing them together, then prying them painfully apart once more.
She felt him touching her. Then-Then-Then-It hurt. She was too small back there and he forced his way and it hurt, it hurt, God in heaven how it hurt. She rolled her hips in agony, wishing he would stop, praying he would end it. But he went on, hammering away at her, tearing her in two, impaling her upon the point of his lustful sword. Again and again he stabbed her to the core, and again and again groans of terror and pain tore from her throat, and she thought it would kill her. that the pain would be so great that it would rip her up and kill her, that she would start bleeding and bleed to death, that it was all over and that, after such immense and overwhelming pain, death would be a blessing.
It did not kill her.
Instead, something else happened, something she had feared. The pain never left her, never let go of her, but pleasure rose up under the pain and strode forward toward the crest of satisfaction, and she was moaning at once with pleasure and pain, lifted and spun and clipped and dazzled by the awesome combination of joy and agony.
Toward the end, she lost the very last vestiges of control. She was awash in a sea of pleasure and pain, panting and crying at once, and a woman-she never found out who it was-knelt in front of her, and her hands locked on the woman's silken thighs, and she buried her own face between the woman's thighs and muffled her own screams in the sweet warmth of the woman. The pain went on and the pleasure went on and she drank deeply of the woman's moist mystery until everything exploded in a Stardust of fiery passion.
Title: ALL FOR LOVE
This third reel, in color, is not a continuation of the saga of the blonde and the brunette and Handsome Harry. Rather, it is an entity complete in itself. It opens with a shot of a girl running across an open field with two men chasing her. The girl is a Negro with skin the color of a Hershey bar. The two men are white. The camera observes with a long shot as the two men run the girl down in the center of the field. They chase her like hounds chasing rabbits. One of the men finally tackles her and sends her sprawling.
The camera moves in for a close-up as the two men rip every stitch of clothing from the girl's body. She is a fine actress-her eyeballs shine with fear and her face is contorted m agony. The camera pans her body-high firm breasts tipped with large nipples, long shapely legs.
One man produces a length of clothesline. The two of them lash the girl to a tree, her arms tied together behind the tree, her legs parted and lashed at the ankles behind the tree.
Subtitle: NOW WE'LL LET HER HAVE IT!
One of the men removes his belt from his pants and begins to flog the girl, raining blow after blow upon her breasts and belly. When he stops, the other man slaps the girl repeatedly across the breasts. The slapper is actually pulling his punches, and the belt is of course a cloth belt which does no damage, but clever acting and camera work manages to conceal the fact from the audience.
Shot of the girl's face, tense with feigned fear and pain.
Subtitle: STOP, STOP! I'LL DO ANYTHING YOU WANT ME TO DO!
The men stop beating the girl. They do not untie her, however. First one of the men has coitus with the girl in a standing position while she remains lashed to the tree. Then the other kneels at her feet for several moments. Then they untie her.
The girl staggers forward, then falls to the ground. The men move in on either side of her and begin kicking her in he ribs and breasts while she rolls in agony. Then one of he men grabs her and makes a gesture. Subtitle: NOW YOU HAVE TWO-US!! The girl performs a variety of unnatural acts with the men, one at a time and both at once. They run through Krafft-Ebing's basic deviations in a hurry, exhausting almost all the possibilities open to two men and one woman. Subtitle: NOW FOR THE FINALE!
The two men both rain blows upon the girl. The girl falls to the ground and does not move. Then both men lie down, using the girl's prostrate body as a sort of mattress, and have homosexual relations with one another until the reel comes to an end.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The party never exactly ended. It sort of withered away. Jeff Baylor left when the movies were finished. By then he had lost his appetite for sex-during the last reel, Gwen Purlie had cornered him in the confusion and had done something incredibly obscene for him, and that had alleviated the evenings sexual tension for him. He packed up the screen and the reels of film and the projector and loaded everything back into the trunk of the Chevy. He locked the trunk, went back to the bam for a last look at the couples rolling around in the hay, then climbed into his car and drove back to the lodge. In his own room, he sat on his bed counting money. There was a hell of a lot of it already, and he had to find a place to keep it rather than carry it around in an easily-purloined wallet. A money belt worn next to the skin would probably be best. In the meantime he salted away the main portion of his roll under a loose board in the floor of the room.
After the movies ended, things lost steam gradually, due both to the absence of the movies and to the general exhaustion which by that time pervaded the bam. While this war of course a crew of oversexed people, they were not superhuman. A surfeit of sex knocked them out.
The Camerons were the first to go. They disengaged themselves from the general mess, fumbled around until they found their clothes, got dressed, and went from barn to car. Rich got behind the wheel. Marilyn sat on her side and sat very close to the car. He started the car, pulled out, headed back toward Cadbury's. They did not speak one word in the course of the drive. When they reached the lodge, they still did not talk. They walked in silence to their room, Marilyn lagging a little ways behind. They undressed in silence and got into bed in silence. They lay there, side by side, without speaking. Hours later they fell asleep.
The Devereauxs and the Fallons left together. Their conversational ebullience was in marked contrast to the silence of the Camerons. Betty Devereaux couldn't stop talking about what a wonderfully wild orgy it had been. Sue Fallon sat with her skirt up and touched herself familiarly and told everyone over and over just how sore she was, and how much fun it had been making it sore, and what a great bunch of movies they had seen. Phil Fallon kept saying that he wished he knew how you got to be in those pictures, and that if their group made a movie it would make the others look like something to show in kindergarten. Jack Devereaux kept saying how much more fun it was to do it with two women than with one, and then remembered the first reel and asked the girls why they didn't have a lesbian act going, so that he and Phil could watch.
Mary Lou and Charles Turner staggered out of the barn after awhile. The Purlies were still inside, making love. It seemed to be a strange finish to an orgy-a married couple rolling around on the hay together. Finally the Purlies came out, glowing, and the four of them drove back to the lodge.
They talked a little, but not very much. Mary Lou went to her room, and the Purlies went to their room, and Turner walked around by the lake, smoking cigarettes and filling his lungs with the cool night air. He was exhausted, but he did not feel like going to sleep. Something was keeping him awake, some wild dark hunger that would not let him rest.
He stood at the lakeshore, watching the play of moonlight on rippling water and trying to force himself to relax. Things were getting wilder and wilder, and the wilder they got the more they excited him, and he was unsure where it would all end. He hoped it did not end badly.
But lately he had begun to realize his constantly-increasing capacity for sexual evil. The sodomy bit with Marilyn Cameron had been a clear-out illustration. And he was afraid of what might happen next. It seemed to him now that there was not a single vile act which he might not at one time or another find himself fully capable of committing, and this scared him.
Eventually he was tired enough to sack out He went to his room and undressed and stretched out on the bed, his mind overflowing with memories of the movies and of the orgy. He could not stop thinking about the last of the three reels, the one in color, the one in which the two white men had mistreated the Negro girl. That reel in particular was one which he found sublimely exciting. The girl, bound and helpless. The belt lashing into breasts and belly, the slapping of those perfect brown breasts, the kicks delivered to breasts and ribs and groin-all this was exciting to him.
Finally, he slept.
This, then, was Friday night. It would be hard to assess Friday night fully. The statistics-the number of separate climaxes, the instances of abnormal activity, the couplings and triplings and back-and-forth switchings, the people watching other people, the movies, the sex, the lust the passion, the sin-cannot be counted, cannot be tabulated, cannot be arranged in any orderly scheme. That is perhaps the essence of an orgy. Statistics no longer apply and there is no scheme of order, nothing that makes any sense. There is only wild abandon, with the whole entity-the group-infinitely greater than the sum of the individuals comprising it. Wild abandon, intoxication with sinful lust: orgy. That was Friday night.
Saturday morning was horrible.
A liquor hangover is unpleasant enough. Whatever its various components may be, they are not delightful. The unending thirst, a form of post-alcoholic dehydration which enables the sufferer to drink Lake Erie without sating that thirst, is one thing. The splitting headache, one which does not yield to aspirin or Empirin or Bufferin or Anacin or APC tablets or anything else, is another. The all-pervading loginess, which leaves one so limp and listless that one can do nothing but sit moping and waiting for the hours to pass, and noticing that it takes each hour a good two hours to pass, is another Diarrhea, constipation, indigestion, nausea, hypertension, cold sweats-the list goes on well-high forever, as any self-respecting alcoholic knows full well. It's enough to make a person stop drinking, it never does, but it's enough to.
A sex hangover is worse.
It's different of course. Instead of the thirst, you have the phenomenal shortness of breath It seems as though you just won't ever catch your breath, because you exercised far too strenuously the night before and you just can't get back on the right track again. You have the headache, of course, only it's more likely to be a concentrated one than an all-over achiness. Say, a sharp pain located behind one of your eyeballs, and remaining there permanently Something nice and delightful like that. And there's the total exhaustion, and the feeling of having behaved badly, and the genital pain, and a few other things, and the overwhelming desire for either castration or hysterectomy, depending upon your gender. It's not fun. It's enough to make a person give up sex, as every self-respecting lecher knows. It's enough to, but k never does.
Like almost everyone else at Cadbury's Lodge that morning, Marilyn Cameron had a sex hangover.
It was a dilly.
She got up a few minutes before noon. Rich was already up and on his way so she was alone in the room. She stayed in bed for ten minutes or so, wanting to get up but unable to summon up the strength. Her head ached and her heart pounded and ... She felt rotten, and let it go at that.
She got up finally, slowly, gingerly. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat there trying to get her breath. She touched her breasts, her loins, her buttocks. Everything ached. She got to her feet swaying slightly bat not quite losing her balance.
Her skin was grimy with sweat-hers and other people's-and her mouth had several horrible tastes in it, and she smelled as though everyone in the world had had sex with her. Which, come to think of R, was not that far from the truth. She had to have a shower. Maybe, she thought it would make her fed a little better.
It didn't It washed the grime and the slime from her body, and a brisk tooth-brushing session got most of the bad tastes from her mouth, but after all was done she still didn't feel a hell of a lot better. She felt cleaner on the outside but she still felt just as irremediably filthy on the inside. And the inside was where it counted. If you were dirty inside, all the showers in the world would not manage to get you dean. The Augean stables are child's play compared to the task of purging a filthy soul.
And her soul was filthy.
Completely filthy.
A sewer.
It was time for lunch, but she did not have any appetite, and the thought of eating anything was enough to make her throw up. She got dressed quickly and simple in a white blouse and a loose plaid skirt. She didn't bother with a bra, not because going braless made her feel sexy-nothing could have made her feel sexy just then-but because she didn't want any bra confining her poor painful breasts. Then she looked at herself in the mirror, convinced that her dissipation showed in her eyes and face. Yet it didn't matter if people could tell. Everybody at the lodge already knew. Everybody at the lodge had been to the bam last night, and had seen her, and had had her, and knew all there was to know about her.
Christ.
Christ on a cane.
The room was a prison. The walls seemed to be coming in toward her, closing in after her, and the ceiling was coming down on her and the floor rushing up at her, and she could not stand the place. The air smelled foul, too. The window was open and a breeze was blowing but it just didn't seem to be doing any good. The air smelled just as foul, breeze or no breeze.
She had to get out of the room.
But, once she got out, where would she go? No place offered sanctuary If she went downstairs, there would be other people around. She was in no mood to meet other people. She could not even stand herself for company, and having anyone else around would be just that much worse, so where in God's name could she go?
Nowhere.
She sighed. The room was impossible, and being alone in it was probably worse than being anyplace else, and she had to get out of it. She walked to the door, opened it. She went downstairs.
People called out to her as she passed through the main room and along the porch and outside. She did not pay any attention to them, barely knew it when someone spoke her name. She moved quite like a robot, knowing only that she had to get out of the lodge and off by herself so that she could at least make a valid attempt at relaxing.
It was hot outside, hot and muggy, hardly the type of weather that Vermont travel bulletins boasted about. The heat would have been hard enough to take at any time; now, coupled with a sex hangover, it was unbearable. She started down the path to the lake shore, then changed her mind and doubled back into the woods. She found the spot where she had come that first day. The large boulder in the grove of pine. She sat on the boulder, doubled up her legs and hugged her knees to her chest.
You are a sinner, she told herself.
A sinner.
An evil person.
She knew why she was a sinner. She was a sinner, in the first place, because she was weak-weak enough to go along with Rich's vile descent into perversity. And she was a sinner because some inner evilness of her own made that perversity perversely enjoyable and exciting to her. And, worst of all, she could not accept her sinfulness and write it off as part of the game. Her guilt feelings were enormous. They hung around her neck like the albatross around the neck of the ancient mariner, weighing her own, burdening her, adding the pain of regret to the sins she had committed. God.
Where would it all end?
For some of the others-the Devereauxs, the Fallons, the Purlies, those who could sin without feeling the enormity of the wrongness of their actions-it would end as it had begun, happily and with light hearts. They would go back to the lives they had been leading all along, and they would live sinfully and not mind the innate sinfullness of their actions, and they would do fine. But for her?
She didn't know, couldn't even bear to think about it. She and Rich could not live as they had lived before It wouldn't work. Their life, if they went on living together, would be vastly different. The little world she had managed to build for herself was finished. And it had been such a fine world, such a healthy world, such a secure and thoroughly comfortable world. She hated to see the end of it, yet she knew there was no way on earth to preserve it.
"Oh, Lord," Gwen Purlie said. "Uh-huh."
"I feel like a dishrag."
"I feel like a Turkish wrestler's jock," Sue Fallon said. "God that was sort of a disgusting way to spend an evening. Really and truly disgusting."
"But fun."
"Oh. of course. Fun. That goes without saying. But God. the way I feel now I'd just as soon never have anything to do with a man again."
"You'll get over it."
"I hope so."
Gwen giggled. "I remember the first time we swapped," she said. "It was really something."
"Oh?"
"It was about a year ago. Well, a little more than a year, I guess. We were over at another couple's house and the four of us sat around drinking and talking and getting pretty well lit. I was bombed and Dan was sort of stoned and the other couple was about the same. Well, the other guy cornered me on the way back from the John, and we did some of the usual drunken necking, only we got a little carried away. I'm not too hard to arouse, you know-"
"I know."
"Yes, I suppose you do. Anyway, he had his hand up my skirt before we got control of ourselves, and when we got back to the living room there was Dan necking with his wife and telling her very tenderly just how much he wanted to get into her pants. I got a little angry at first, but then I thought why not, what harm would it do, we all four wanted to and it seemed like as good a time as any. The other guy suggested it and nobody objected, so he hauled me off to a bedroom and we made it while Dan banged his wife on a couch. And since then it's been one hot little joy-ride."
Sue smiled. Then the smile faded slightly. "God," she said, "we're a jaded bunch. Is there anything we haven't done?"
"Nothing that I can think of."
"I can think of something,"
"What?"
Sue took a breath. "Oh, you know. What the two girls were doing in the first reel of that dirty movie."
"You mean the lesbian bit?"
Sue shrugged, grinned. "I just meant it's something wt haven't done. Or maybe you have-"
"Never."
"Neither have I."
"Why did you bring it up?"
"No reason. I just-"
"Are you sure there's no reason?"
"I-"
Gwen said: "It might be interesting. Just to try."
"Do you think so?"
"Maybe. Was that a proposition? When you brought up the subject, I mean?"
"I'm not sure."
"Well," Gwen said. "I'll think it over. And you think it over. Neither of us are very moral anyway. We might try it on just to see how it fits."
"I'll think it over."
"Sure," Gwen said.
Turner had never felt better in his life. Somehow he managed to miss out on the sex hangover that had hit most of the rest of the party. He was a little tired, sure. But that was all, and the tiredness was not in the least unpleasant. He had no headache, felt no recriminations, experienced no listlessness, and did not feel as though sex was something he never wanted to hear about again. As a matter-of-fact, he woke up eager.
Mary Lou came to his room not long after noon. Her eyes were shining and she looked good. There were dark circles under her eyes, mute witnesses to the dissipation of the night before, but other than that she looked fine.
"Hi," she said.
"Hello."
"How do you feel?"
"Good. You?"
"I feel fine. Look-"
"What is k?"
"It's Kathy," she said.
"Kathy?"
"It's a long story," Mary Lou told him. "You know one of the waitresses, the short dark one, her name is Kathy? You know the one I mean?"
He knew the one she meant.
"Well, she's a ... a lesbian. And she and I had a thing going. You know, like we used to do it."
He stared at her. This was something he hadn't known about, something he would never have guessed. As far as he could tell, it would be difficult in the extreme to find a girl or woman more determinedly heterosexual than Mary Lou Timmel. But maybe you could never tell. And maybe she was a both-ways type, a girl who liked it any way at all just so she got enough of it.
"She's a virgin," the girl went on. "She doesn't do it with men, the thought of it makes her sick. And she doesn't have anyone to make it with on account of there aren't any lesbians here, and I get a charge out of it and so does she, and she just asked me if I was in the mood, and-"
"And you are," he said.
"Uh-huh."
"And you want to do it with her?"
"If it's all right." The girl sighed and her big breasts bobbed temptingly. T knew we agreed not to, I mean just to stick to people in the group and everything, but nobody would have to know about this and I'd kind of like to and it means a lot to Kathy, so if you don't mind-"
"I don't mind," he said.
"Oh, good. Look, I'll see you later-"
"First come here," he said.
"What for?"
He moved the bed-sheet aside, exposing himself. "Just take a guess," he said.
He took her quickly, brutally, even hurting her a little. Then he let her go off to Kathy, and while she was gone he showered and shaved and dressed and went downstairs to the porch.
Kathy.
The girl was a virgin, a little dyke who hated the thought of a man touching her. Small, and lovely, and a dyke who was goddamn terrified of men.
An interesting thought.
A fascinating concept.
Something to think about. Something he could turn over and over in his ugly mind, thinking and planning and plotting, getting ideas and images and pictures. Something was going to happen to Kathy Mills. Something ugly was going to happen to Kathy Mills. Something genuinely terrible was going to happen to Kathy Mills.
And he was going to do it to her.
"Oh, hell," Betty Devereaux said. "Oh, damnit to hell, anyway. It would happen." Jack said; "What?"
"Oh, damn it, anyway. Well, I suppose it would have to happen sooner or later. I suppose it would be worse if it didn't happen, don't you think?"
"Don't I think what?"
"That it would be worse."
He stared at her. "That what would be worse?"
"Like I said."
He took a breath. "Whatever you said," he said, "you left me standing at the post. I don't get it."
"I did."
"You did what?"
"I got it," Betty said. "The curse. The monthly disaster. My period, honey. Isn't that a hell of a note?"
"I didn't know you were due for it."
"I guess I was. Lord, I just had a thought."
"What?" .
"It could have been last night."
"That's a thought, all right. Good thing it wasn't."
"Uh-huh. But what do we do now?"
"Nothing, I guess."
"Great. Four days of nothing to do."
"Maybe it won't last that long."
"It'll probably last five days, with my luck. Or a week, just to be properly rotten. Well, we know I'm not pregnant."
"Terrific."
"Uh-huh. Well, what the hell."
"Sure," Jack said. "Well, cheer up, kitten. Into each life a little rain must fall, you know."
"If it were rain," she said, "I wouldn't mind so much."
It was the kind of weather for sitting on a porch and drinking a mint julip. In the South, everybody would have been doing just that. This was Vermont, so everybody wasn't, although the drink is just as appropriate north or south as long as the weather is sufficiently impossible. Ora Cadbury, however, had whored in Newport long enough to accumulate bits and pieces of the southern tradition. While she wasn't exactly the magnolia plantation ante-bellum type, she knew enough to appreciate the advantages of a mint julep on a hot day.
Mint grew wild outside. She picked a couple of young leaves, carried them to the kitchen, crushed them and dropped them to the bottom of a tall glass. She wrapped up ice cubes in a towel and bopped the towel with a hammer until she had cracked ice. She added a teaspoon full of sugar to the mint, filled the glass with cracked ice, then poured bourbon and filled the glass to the brim. She stirred the mixture, took a preliminary taste of it, smiled the smile of a successful woman, and carried the drink out to the porch.
If she had not had the background she had-the background of practical prostitution-she might have been a little bit put off by the mob of sex fiends inhabiting her resort. But that was one thing about working in a business that catered to man's baser drives. Sooner or later you came to the realization that a tremendous quantity of persons are out-and-out perverts of one persuasion or another, and that loathing a person for his perversity is downright silly. You didn't spit on someone who happened to march to a different drummer. You exploited his hungers, maybe, but you didn't spit on him.
And there were tremendous advantages in having perverts for clients. She was just beginning to appreciate those advantages. The basis of them all was this-if a person is doing something sexually abnormal, he's perfectly content to put up with almost anything just so long as you leave him alone to enjoy sex as he wishes.
In the resort business, this is significant.
She didn't have to worry about providing activity for this crowd of guests, for one thing. They made their own fun.
She didn't have to worry about the weather. They would just as soon lay each other's wives indoors or out, so it didn't matter whether the sun shined or whether it poured. It was pretty much the same to them one way or the other.
She didn't have to tear her hair out if the food was bad, or if the service was lousy, or if the place was understaffed, or if the bellhops and chambermaids were goofing off. The guests would not dream of complaining.
In short, she didn't have to do a damn thing. Instead of running around like a chicken with its head cut off she could sit in a rocker on the porch and sip a mint julep till Hell boiled over. The guests were having the time of their lives, and nothing she did or didn't do would affect them.
Which was fine.
Hell, it was perfect.
The julep tasted perfect. Good and cold, nice and bourbonish, with just a hint of mint and a dab of sugar. A good way to beat the heat, and a nice way to get a slight edge on. She didn't need the edge, but it didn't hurt. A little drinking never hurt anyone. It was different with Owen-he was a lush, and that was something else again. But a little drinking wouldn't hurt her.
She thought about the bellhop, Jeff. That was one sharp kid, she thought. She had known sharpers like him in Newport and other towns where she had gigged around. They always had their eyes and ears open. They stayed on top of things. They were always looking out for themselves and for no one else, and they always had their eyes on the fast dollar, and they drove expensive cars and had expensive women and wore expensive clothes. If this one had the stuff, he could do pretty well as a hotster. And from what she could see, the kid had the stuff.
That was fine with her. He was doing more to please the guests as a pimp than he could ever have done as a simple bellhop, and this way he didn't cost her two hundred and fifty bucks the way he would have otherwise. The arrangement could not have pleased her more. The kid was working for her good if not specifically for her, and he wasn't costing anything, and what could be better?
She sipped the julep. Just perfect, she told herself. Just utterly perfect.
She wondered what she would do when the season ended. Maybe there would be enough money for her to go to Florida, she thought. She could do it without too much dough, just lock up the lodge and take a plane down there and spend the winter in the sun. Without Owen, of course. There was no need to divorce the louse. All she had to do was stop somewhere along the way, like New York, and get him a little more loaded than usual, and get on the plane without him. She was reasonably certain that he wouldn't find his way back to Vermont, and still more sure that he wouldn't manage to follow her to Florida. No point in keeping him-he didn't do anything but drink, and the amount he drank added up to a heavy sum, and she just plain didn't need him any more.
She sipped the julep again. Everything, she thought, was working out nicely.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"I think it's perfectly safe," Gwen Purlie said. "I don't think anybody's going to come looking for us, and anyway the door's locked. So I think it's perfectly safe."
"I hope so," Sue said.
"Not that it matters. But there's no reason for the boys to find out that we decided to have a little fun on our own. Just for the sake of experiment, of course."
"Of course."
"How do we get started?"
"I don't know. I'd feel fairly silly kissing you, or necking, or any or that."
"So would I."
"But the rest might be fun."
"They looked as though they were enjoying themselves in the movie."
"Uh-huh. That blonde-"
"She was the one with the wicked tongue, wasn't she?"
"Uh-huh. Look, what do we do now?"
"Get undressed, I guess."
"I suppose. Gee, it feels funny. Undressing in front of you like this and getting ready to ... to do it God, I wish I had your figure."
"The one you've got is fine, honey."
"But I'm not as chesty as you are. Jesus, you've got the nicest titties in the world."
"I'm pretty impressed with yours, to tell the truth."
"Really? Help me with the bra, will you?"
"Sure. Say, do you like this?"
"Uh-huh."
"I never felt up a girl before. Hey. you're getting hot!"
"Am I?"
"Well, your nipples are getting firm. Mmmm, this is fun."
"Well, get naked, honey."
"Okay. Help me with the bra, huh?"
"Sure."
"And feel me up a little, huh?"
"Like this?"
"God, yes. Hey, what do we do now?"
"We just do it, I suppose."
"I wish one of us knew what the hell we were doing."
"I think we're making out okay."
"We're making out. That's the truth. This is a comfortable bed, you know?"
"You've been on it often enough with my husband."
"Uh-huh. He's good, you know."
"I know."
"His wife's no slouch, either. Hey, that feels divine."
"Does it?"
"Uh-huh. What do you think we should do now?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe about the same thing they were doing in the movie."
"We don't have any bananas, sweet."
"The other stuff."
"Like this?"
"That's the idea. Oh, God, is that ever the idea!"
Marilyn walked slowly, heading through the woods to the lodge. There was only one answer now. She was sure of it, just one answer, just one way out. They had sinned and they had to be punished. They had turned evil and they had to pay for their evilness. They had been bad, very bad, and they had to pay the piper for the vile little dance they had done.
At least she had to pay. Rich would pay in his own way, sooner or later. It was not for her to mete out punishment to him. For a time she had thought of doing so. It would not have been overly hard to kill him. But she could not be a judge. He would pay in his own way and at his own time.
She was not built for killing, anyway. And his murder would only be another sin on her shoulders, and another sin was more than her shoulders could carry. So he could live, for the time being at least, because it was not his time.
It was her time, though.
Her time.
Not just because of what she had done. She was not that much of a puritan. If she thought now that there was a way still for her to make a decent life for herself, then she would not be overly concerned about guilt and punishment. But if there was such a way she could not see it. She knew only that her marriage-as she knew it-was finished. She knew that any decent self-image was gone. She knew, in short, that the game was up. She had lost, and the best thing she could do at this point was lose gracefully. Anything else would be a mistake.
A grave mistake.
Grave mistake. That was cute, she thought. A nice little pun, the sort of thing that would make a good title for a mystery novel, one of those who-done-it things.
She had always liked reading. It was a good escape for her, a quick lift to another world. She realized suddenly that she would never read another book. And all at once, dying had a personal touch. The notion of suddenly ceasing to be is such a mammoth concept that she could not grasp it, but the simple fact that she would never read another book brought death home to her in a far more concrete manner. She would never read another book, she would never see another sunset, she would never hear a bird sing, she would never go to a play, she would never kiss or be kissed, she would never again do anything at all.
She would be ... dead.
How? How would you kill yourself? She got into the lodge and walked up the stairs and went into her empty room, wondering about it. She was afraid now. Maybe she wouldn't be able to go through with it. Maybe she would renege and cop out and not have the guts to carry it off. Anything that was painful-slashed wrists, hanging-she was scared of it, scared of her own inability to endure it long enough to reach the sweet release of death.
How?
Sleeping pills, she thought. She had them. She could take the whole bottle and go to sleep. That was all-she would go to sleep. And she would not wake up. She would just go on sleeping forever, and there would be no trauma of death because she would sleep and sleep and sleep.
But suppose someone found her. Suppose they revived her, or suppose she took them and then got scared and changed her mind and couldn't manage to stay with her decision and had them pump her stomach and, God forbid, went on living.
That would be bad.
Then she figured out the method. Something fast, something that would happen ,on impulse, something that when once set in motion would be quite irreversible. She knew what to do now. All she had to do was go ahead and do it.
She left the room and left the lodge and walked out into the sunlight again. The car was parked over on the side. She got into it, sat behind the wheel. Rich generally kept an extra ignition key in the ash tray. She looked: it was there.
She started the car, drove out of the area and off down the road. She drove quite slowly at first, then leaned more and more heavily on the accelerator. The car was bucking along at fifty-five. She breathed deeply and expelled the air in a sigh.
She had to be careful. There was no sense in hitting another car. She was going to end her own life, and there was no reason in the world for her to drag anyone else to death along with her. She would just drive the car along until something happened, until something made her drive badly, and then she would have an accident.
The accident would kill her.
At one point she realized that she had fastened her seat belt, and this made her laugh. Habits died hard, she thought. Here she was, set to kill herself in a car, and she had fastened her seat belt. She opened it quickly. Anything designed to preserve her life was something she wanted nothing to do with.
She drove faster. Sixty.
Sixty-five. Seventy.
The needle -edged past the seventy mark. At one point she started to swing off the road, then stopped. No. Not yet.
Faster. Seventy-five now, and no traffic anywhere, and the car was racing along the road, and all at once she felt free, magnificently free, and it was time.
There was a tree up ahead. An elm, and close to a hundred and twenty years old. The trunk was almost four feet in diameter. A huge tree, an impressive tree. It would have taken experienced lumberjacks a long time to saw through that tree.
She knocked it down in no time at all. The car took the tree dead-center at something like eighty-five miles an hour. The impact was incredible. The tree cracked jaggedly. The car crumpled up into a metallic ball, and the woman inside it took the steering wheel through the chest.
That killed her. When the gas tank went and the car burned with a bright blue flame, she was already dead. Only her corpse was burning in the wreckage.
Jeff Baylor passed the wreck on the way to Middlebury. He saw the car, realized that someone was burning in it, and kept driving. He didn't know who was in the car. He didn't particularly care. He had business in Middlebury, and that was all he cared about.
The call had not told him much. Something big brewing, something that would be important to him. Bring anything hot that he had and things would pop.
Well, he had a carload full. Maybe that was what he had in mind, whoever the mystery man on the phone was. One way or another, he would find out. And if it was going to mean money, then little Jeff would be sure to be there. Because he was developing a real appetite for money.
Money was what made it for you. Money set you up and kept you going. Money greased all the wheels. Money meant the sharp car and the fur-wrapped women and the Italian silk suits and the posh apartments and everything else.
Money.
Man, things had changed. At the beginning, all he wanted was a way to hustle himself a thousand bucks for the summer so that he could leech around Newport and try to make a connection. Hell, the way things were going, he could walk into Newport and buy the goddamn place. No hustling for a thousand bucks. He was that much to the good already, and there was a lot of the summer left, and the take was getting bigger every day.
He had a little trouble finding the place in Middlebury. He had to ask directions twice, and then he made a few false turns, and finally he pulled up in front of a shack on a dead end street and hopped out of the car. He walked up to the door, hesitated long enough to get a cigarette going, and knocked on the door.
A man opened it. Brawny, with red hair and a cleft chin. The man looked at him.
"I'm Baylor," he told him.
"Yeah," the red-haired man said. "Come on in."
There was another man inside. He was just about as big and as bald as an egg. Neither of them gave their names. The redheaded asked him if he had the stuff.
Jeff said: "It depends what you want."
"What have you got?"
"I can get anything."
"Yeah, sure. What have you got with you?"
"Pictures. Stills and movies, and the equipment to show the stuff. Interested?"
"Where is it?"
"In the trunk."
"Trunk locked?"
"Yeah."
"You got the keys?"
Something didn't ring true. "Hang on a minute," he said. "Let's talk a deal first. Then we'll worry about what's in the trunk and where the keys are."
The redhead didn't show a thing in his face. He just reached out ponderously, like a bear for honey. His hand, curled into a fist, took Jeff in the pit of the stomach. It was like getting hit by a car. Jeff folded up and vomited.
The redhead said: "The key."
"God-"
The redhead kicked him in the stomach. He threw up again and he had trouble catching his breath. God, they were high jacking him!
Well, it was better to lose the stuff than to get killed. And he could even the score later on. He could get these two louses and get them good, and then he could get the stuff back, and then they would find out who was sharp and who wasn't.
"The keys."
He gave the key to the redhead. The redhead tossed it underhand to the bald man. The bald man went outside. Jeff stayed on the floor and waited.
The bald man was smiling when he came back. "The whole works," he announced. "Five reels of dirt, stacks of action shots, a screen, projection equipment, everything. It's a whole goddamn Porno-mobile. You never saw anything like
"Go ahead and take it," Jeff said. "Steal it. But you'll be sorry you did."
The redhead kicked him in the face.
When he came to he was staring at a badge. "Police," the redhead said. "My God, you run a hell of an operation for a punk who doesn't know the score. Everywhere I go I hear Jeff Baylor. You want anything, you just go and see Jeff Baylor. This Jeff Baylor, he has everything going for him but a brain. You think all cops are idiots? You can't operate here without permission any more than you can operate any place else. And you didn't have the brains to buy permission, you stupid little jerk."
They were cops. God, he thought he was going to flip. Cops! Oh, Lord.
"Listen," he said, "maybe we can work a deal."
"It's too late."
"I've got money."
"Sure you do."
"Better than a thou. No kidding."
They looked at him. Then they looked at each other, and then they looked at him again.
The bald one said: "We checked your wallet while you were out. You haven't got a thou. Hell, you haven't got bus-fare."
"It's not on me. It's at my place."
"Sure. You could of made a deal a while ago. You got no money, kid. You got a little stretch in jail to look forward to. I figured you ought to be out in a year."
A year! God, he couldn't spend a year in some rotten Vermont jail. He couldn't make a scene like that. Good, he had a set-up with all the money in the world staring him in the face and he had to fall like this. Damnit, why wouldn't they believe him? He had the money. He had plenty of money.
"It's in my room," he said. "Sure."
"It is. There's this loose floorboard, it's underneath it, right by the head of the bed, you could go in there and get it and I'll wait here until you get back. I mean it."
"You'll wait here? Just like that?"
"One of you could wait with me."
"Look," the bald man said, "we could try. We could give the kid a break."
"A break? This little louse?"
"Hell, he's not dry behind the ears yet."
"I don't know," the redhead said.
Oh, Christ, Jeff thought.
"I'll tell you," the redhead said. "I'll wait here with the kid and you see if the money's where he says it is. For all you know it's a lot of money."
"It's there," Jeff said.
He told the bald man how to find his room. Then he waited with the redhead while the bald man drove to the lodge and back. It took what seemed like a hell of a long time. Jeff thought he was going to go crazy. God, what if the money wasn't there. Suppose it disappeared, suppose somebody got to it before the bald cop did and it was gone.
The bald cop came back, finally. He patted his breast pocket and nodded.
"How much?"
"A little over twelve yards. Enough?"
"Sure," the redhead said.
"Look," Jeff said. "Leave me a little, huh? I mean-" The redhead laughed at him. He turned to the bald one.
"I'm gonna tell him," he said. "He's a gusty kid, he's an operator. I'm gonna tell him."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I think so." The redhead moved closer to Jeff.
"Kid." he said, "I got a secret for you. We're not cops." Jeff gaped.
"You've been had, kid. You've been hustled, you got lots of cool but not much brains when someone pushes you a little. You know how to run a racket but you don't know people, kid, and until you sharpen up a little you'll get conned every damn time."
The redhead hit him in the face, and he went down.
When he came to and realized just what had happened he turned white. They had conned him. They weren't cops at all. they were just after his dough, and he had been dumb enough to send them for it and dumb enough to lose everything.
He lay down on the floor and cried like a baby.
"Well, I'll be damned," Gwen Purlie said. "You said it."
"Pretty good, huh?"
"Pretty great."
"You know it. I think I could get to like it."
"Of course," Sue Fallon said, "it's still better with men."
"Sure. Goes without saying."
"But this has its possibilities."
"It does indeed."
"You know, I think you've got a wickeder tongue than the blonde in the movies."
"You're not so bad yourself."
"I wouldn't want it as a steady thing-"
"But it's fun now and then."
"Exactly."
"Sort of a dash of variety."
"Right you are."
"Want to go another round?" A grin. "Sure. I'm game."
Turner waited until night. Then he began keeping his eyes open for Kathy. He knew that Mary Lou was done with her for the evening and that the little lesbian would be alone.
That was the way he wanted it.
Already he could feel the forces building up within his body, strengthening him, turning him into a depravity machine. He was primed and ready to go. When he saw the girl on her way out of the lodge, his palms were moist with sweat and his heart was beating much faster than usual.
He was going to get her.
And it was going to be rape.
That was the obvious step. After orgy, the next step was rape. It was that simple. He had been to an orgy the night before, and now he would rape a lesbian, and what could be more thoroughly logical than that? She was the girl he wanted, and it almost went without saying that he could not have her without raping her, so that much made rape inevitable. But that was not all there was to it He wanted to rape her. He knew for certain that he would enjoy her more if he had to rape her, and that he would enjoy her more the more she struggled.
He was sure of it.
He gave her a minute or so after she left the lodge, long enough for her to get clear of the area but not long enough for her to lose him. Then he got up from his seat and went after her. The night was warm for a Vermont evening but a lot cooler than the day. The air had a piney smell to it. He walked along after her, moving swiftly through the blackness of the night, moving swiftly and silently.
It took him a while to catch up with her. There was a moment or two when he thought he had lost her trail, and at those moments his eyes closed and his body went rigid with anger. But he caught hold of himself and stuck to her trail.
He found her. She was by the lake shore. She was sitting there, smoking a cigarette, looking out at the lake. When she heard him, she turned slowly and looked at him. Her face was calm. There was no terror in her eyes.
There would be.
"Hi," she said. "Something wrong?"
"Nothing wrong."
"Did you want anything?"
"Yes."
"What?"
He grinned. He told her, and her eyes widened. "Not me," she said. "I'm not interested. Ask someone else."
"I'm not asking."
"What?"
"Im telling you," he said. "I'm going to rape you, you dirty little dyke. I'm going to shove it all the way up to your neck. I'm going to ball your ears off."
She got to her feet but she was too slow. He rushed her, and she tried to dodge his bull-like charge but didn't make it, and he caught her by the shoulders and tumbled her back to the ground, falling on her like a tree. He was gasping now, wild with the sheer joy of it. She opened her mouth to scream and he slammed a sledgehammer fist into her face. The scream never got out. Two of her teeth broke off and blood flowed freely from her mouth.
The sight of the blood turned his passion white hot. He acted without being entirely aware of what he was doing. His big hands tore her clothing off, stripping garment after garment from her small, Soft body. She fought him at first. Her nails raked his face and her teeth snapped at him, trying to bite him. She aimed a knee at his groin and missed. For punishment he put his knee on her stomach and leaned all his weight on it. She moaned as though she were dying and the moan was music to his ears.
When she was down to bra and panties he stopped stripping her and punished her a little instead. He slapped her back and forth across the face, hitting with full strength. He hit her in the stomach, pounded her in the breasts.
Then the bra.
Then the panties.
Nude, she looked pathetically defenseless. He flipped her over onto her stomach and slapped her bare buttocks till they glowed red from the beating. He rolled her over onto her back again and worked on her breasts as the man had done to the Negro girl in the movie last night, slapping forehand and backhand. But he wasn't pulling his punches.
Kathy screamed.
The scream did it. It pierced the night, shrill, horrible. It pierced Turner, too. It pierced him over the edge. He tore his own clothes off, grabbed Kathy with a hand on each thigh. He yanked her thighs apart and invaded her with Ins hungry fingers.
She writhed in agony.
"Nice," he said. "Now let's see how you like it with a man instead of a girl." And he took her.
It was hard. She was very, very small and he tore her open when he took her. She was a virgin, and she bled, and she cried and moaned and twisted with the pain, but all her pain only made everything that much more exciting for him. He was a madman driven by forces too powerful to be denied. He was in the grip of something infinitely greater than himself, captive to the lusts that drove him on. All at once Kathy Mills was a symbol of everything that had ever gone wrong, of the wife who had left him, of all the evil in the world.
And he was destroying her.
More, with Kathy writhing and moaning and bleeding.
More, with his awesome power surging into the sweet female essence of her, slamming again and again into her, driving deeper and deeper with every vicious stroke.
More, with his hands moving from her breasts to her throat, a hand on each side of that throat.
More, with the hands locked around her neck, beginning to tighten their grip.
More-
And his passion tossed itself up and up and up, higher and ever higher, and it reached its peak and exploded, and at that precise moment when his lust bubbled over with fulfillment, at that very instant his hands tightened convulsively and choked the last breath of life out of Kathy Mills.
