LOVE GODDESS was what Bill Ramsen was searching for. But strangely, not the love a goddess of beauty such as his wife could give him. For Ramsen was driven by a strange and evil urge. He had to find his love in the arms of a young girl, any young girl depraved enough to welcome his abnormal desires. And strangely, mere were many who would, many who were eager for the forbidden pleasures he offered. There was Sami, young and pretty, who let him take her to the beach, and the hot sand kindled a flame in both of them that neither could put out except in each other's arms. There were others, too numerous to count, nameless faces on sordid streets, passionate young things who were looking for kicks any place and any way. And there was June. The daughter of Ramsen's friend and neighbor. June who promised to be the fulfillment of his terrible abnormality. He must capture June, and he must make certain she was his forever. Even if it meant certain death to life in a normal society. Meet this man, pity and hate him for what he was-lust incarnate!
CHAPTER ONE
I sat on the front stoop and watched them going down the street and I knew it was happening again. I fought it, but it was no good. No damn good at all. They were getting to me, in a bad way. Worse than it had been in a long time. I knew then that I was going to do something about it.
The can of beer grew warm in my hands, barely tasted, as I watched them traipse by on the sidewalk. I forgot about the beer. I just sat there and looked-me, a thirty-year-old man with a beautiful wife and two fine kids. I forgot about them, too, as I watched. They became no more important than the can of beer in my hand. Less. They were inside the house, out of sight, out of mind. The girls weren't.
Yes, I said girls. Not women. Not those big boobed, broad-hipped females who, at twenty, were already over the hill as far as I was concerned. I wasn't interested in them. They were there too, part of the landscape, part of the passing scene, but I wasn't interested. The hell, I had married one of the best looking of all of that kind anyway. She was inside. I could go to her if I wanted. The kids were already asleep and she was probably waiting for me right now, in the bedroom, fixing herself up, adding those little finishing touches to her hair which were quite unnecessary, which couldn't make her any more beautiful than she already was-she was probably doing all this anyway, for me, wishing I could come and take her and make wild love to her marvelous body.
The way I hadn't in two weeks.
Okay, she was in there. Good for her. But I was out on the stoop, watching the girls go down the street, and the two worlds had no connection. Jean-nette could wait. She'd been waiting, and she could wait this much longer.
Girls, they were. Technically, in the eyes of the law, they were hardly more than young teens; but in my eyes they were a lot more than that They were little goddesses, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, parading down the sidewalks of Canarsie.
They were parading for me. Bill Rams en. No one else.
Of course, they didn't know this. They had no idea, or they might not have flaunted their graceful little limbs so carelessly in front of my private reviewing stand. If they had any idea of what they were putting me through, or the thoughts I was thinking, they probably would have run home and hid under the bed. A very good place for them to be.
"Bill."
It was my wife calling. I could read a lot in the tone of just that one spoken word, my name. There was a pleading, a tender pleading, concern, gentle urgency, a question, a demand-all in that one spoken word. There was no suspicion. I didn't answer. I knew that in a minute or two she would call again, and maybe then I would answer. Maybe.
But right then I was occupied with something else. The Pearson girl, from two houses up, was wheeling past on her bicycle. It gave me a lump in my throat just watching her. June, her name was, and a more graceful little creature the gods had never put together. She was blonde, and too young to have made herself that way. Not more than fourteen or fifteen, I calculated. She wore pale blue shorts and a white sleeveless blouse, vee throated, with no collar. Her skin was nicely tanned and she rocked to and fro as she rode past, tossing me a "Hi, Mr. Ramsen," and a smile. One thing I could keep for a while, a small treasure to dwell over during late sleepless hours until I saw her again. That treasure she left me, but I wanted more. I had wanted more since the first time she baby-sat for Wendy, my six-year-old daughter. I had wanted more, more, more than little June Pearson could possibly imagine giving anyone. I wanted to kiss those soft young lips.
Instead I sat on the top stoop and choked and trembled with my uncontrollable desire, bending the beer can in my hand without knowing I had done so. I wanted to cry it out to the night, to run after her, pursue my little goddess to some secret seaside lair where we would make love to the sound of the roaring waves. Desire was a hard hot coil in me. To live those few brief minutes in the fresh flux of desire was a torture. To live them without my June moon goddess was a personal hell which I could share with no man. Of all fantasies that have dogged my mind since the first sign of puberty made itself known to me, those few minutes were the most intense.
If I could only have told someone; shared my secret and thereby succored my pain....
But who was there to take my problem to?
To my wife? Trusting soul, she saw me as the dutiful husband, dutiful in love as in all other things; the Great Provider; the A-l All American Husband. Which was why she had married me in the first place.
And which was precisely why I couldn't tell her.
To Jim Pearson? With whom I played poker every Tuesday night, who was the father of June? Sure I could go tell him, if I was in the mood to get tarred, feathered, lynched, burned and otherwise murdered. Just walk up to him and say "Look, Jim, I'm going to make love to your nice young daughter until she turns blue tonight, okay?" Sure I could. The trouble is, what about all the other fathers of all the other Junes in the world-could I go tell them, too? Because that's exactly what I'd have to do, and it would take one hell of a long time to run through the list. I was a sick man, with a sickness I couldn't cure.
There was no one.
Yeah, there were bug doctors to go to, if I wanted to spend time in the shrink. But they charge you a lot of money just to tell you what's wrong with you, and I knew what was wrong with me and there wasn't any cure for it in the funny farm they'd send me to.
I'd have to find my own cure.
"Bill, are you coming?" Softly, from the bedroom.
"All right! Just a few minutes to finish my beer!"
I finished it by pouring it over the edge of the stoop onto the grass. It hissed back at me, foaming its way into the parched summer lawn. Then I finished the job on the can, bending it in two with one hand so that the ends touched. Not much of an accomplishment. But I know some guys at thirty-three who can't even do that. So great. So Bill Ramsen can bend beer cans with one hand, and if he had his way he'd be bending young girls with the other.
I also know some guys at thirty-three who are sane. They don't think about such things. They're normal adult men. They kiss their wives in the morning and go to work and come home in the evening and kiss their wives and this goes on for five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, maybe twenty or so years of their life, and that's it. Oh, all right, maybe an affair once or twice, an office quickie or a tramp in a hotel room in another city during an annual convention, that kind of thing. It happens. They feel guilty a couple of days, then secretly glad they did it and grateful it didn't get found out by the Missus and oh, Thank God, they'll never never do it again. And they don't-
Sounds awful, doesn't it?
I envy them.
I envy them because I'm almost one of them. Ifs the almost that makes the difference. Visibly, on the surface, you couldn't distinguish me from any normal man, from any of the nine-to-fivers who catch their subways, buses, and commuting trains daily and pour in a steady gray stream into the steaming city to cam their daily bread, and pour back again, limp, into the sprawling suburbs come evening. Canarsie may not be a suburb, but it's the closest thing to it, and the house I lived in there was just mine and the bank's. I bought it with a twenty year mortgage and there was only fifteen years to go and then it wouldn't be the bank's any more, just mine. Only I probably wouldn't want it by then anyway. They haven't built a good house for less than forty thousand since the big war. I got mine for twenty-five and in twenty years it wouldn't be worth that. But it was part of the big illusion, carefully cultivated and packaged for people like us, like me and Jeanette, when we got married. It's not so bad living in an illusion when the whole country's doing the same damn thing, though. A house in Canarsie doesn't sound romantic as hell but it looked good at the time and we bought it and made plans. And revised plans when Joey was born, two years ahead of schedule, and then Wendy followed a year later, again two years ahead of schedule. One of us was fertile as hell and neither one of us, in those years, had much patience with the standard birth control methods. They just weren't fast enough for us.
But all in all, looking back, those were good years. Normal years, years when I was getting a good start at the agency, making contacts and bringing clients and establishing myself as one of the regular monthly winners in the Premium Value Sold contests. I sell insurance. It's a tough racket that involves a lot of leg work and luck to get started in, but once you've made it, you can sit back and the clients practically come to you.
Well, I made it. Now, it was only a matter of a year or two until I became head of the Westfoco Agency, replacing old Dillworth, who was due to retire. At thirty-three, that's pretty good. Almost as good as squashing beer cans with your hand.
So you see, for all appearances, I'm one of them.
Like hell I am.
After nine years of it I'm so damn bored I don't care if Dillworth lives to be a thousand. I don't care if the bank takes the house and Jeanette and the kids with it. I'm a rotten heel and I get this hell inside me every time I see anything in a pair of shorts or a skirt or slacks that's under twenty and I know I'm going to do something about it Maybe I'll get away with it and maybe I won't. If I don't the whole illusion-the house, the job, the wife and the kids-goes up in smoke.
If I do....
Jeanette was waiting. Maybe you have a woman Eke Jeanette waiting, or maybe you have had one like her waiting, at one time or another. If you have, then you know how it is.
If you haven't, I'll tell you how it is.
You take your time walking to the bedroom, because there's no urgency about L You know she's going to be there. You think about her along the way, and you get a little excited doing it. You've done this same thing, many, many, many nights, but you still get a little excited along the way. Because it's still a lot of woman there in the bedroom. Nine years, two kids, and she was still a lot of woman. Some are like that-they don't lose it. Maybe you know. Plenty of them do lose it. They blow up after the first kid, they go to hell, their breasts start sagging like tired punching bags, they develop a new fold of flab every two months, their skin gets coarse as plaster, they stuff themselves with candy and starches because they don't give a damn; they know they've got their meal ticket, some poor slob who will work his rear off for twenty years for them and then retire and die in a couple more years and leave them with enough in the way of insurance and bank accounts to live easy or hook another ticket with, if they can. That's the way a lot of them are. I know. In the insurance racket you get to see them and they're all the same. They talk the same and look the same and act the same and go to the same beauty parlors to get their mugs in shape for the Saturday cocktail parties or country club dances in the hope some poor drunken slob will be fooled enough by it to squeeze their boobs or pinch their rear for them so they can think about it all week, when the paid-for face has worn off again and they can go back to eating candy and starch. That's the way they are, the female middle class who own, ion, and operate the whole country. Not Jeanette.
She wasn't like that at all. Any normal Joe would probably spend his nights on his knees thanking his lucky stars for a woman like I had. Let me tell you about her.
If you go out in the woods in early autumn and find a chestnut tree and pick up one of the green, partly open prickly pods lying underneath, you'll see the color of her hair. And it has the same satiny sheen of a newly opened chestnut. If you don't like this kind of poetic description, skip the next paragraph, because this happens to be the way I get when I describe Jeanette.
Most women have eyes and Jeanette was no exception in this respect. But her eyes were. They were a strange color, like old mellow honey gets when you keen it in a jar awhile. Only what most people don't notice with eyes is that it's the shape that counts. The shape and the thickness of the lids. Thick eyelids can mar the beauty of otherwise good eyes, which is why so many women use eye makeup the consistency of wet mortar. Jeanette used none. Her eyes were wide, clear, and perfectly shaped, somewhat along lines of almonds, but much larger. The irises were flecked with bits of brown and gold, combining toward the honey effect just mentioned. They were the kind of eyes that could carry off an expression, render a fleeting emotion without the aid of any other facial movement at all. They could darken with anger, like twin sloes; smoulder like autumn leaves; brighten like champagne with pleasurable anticipation; caress you with tenderness; scold you with sharpness. Jeanette had planned to be an actress when I first met her. Her eyes alone would have taken her far.
But there was more than the eyes. There was, for instance, the shape of her face. Classic in its proportions, it could have been the work of the Greek Praxiteles at the pinnacle of his powers. Straight, thin nose, delicately flared wings at the nostrils. Clearly defined planes of the cheekbones and chin. Lips curving gracefully like a partially taut Cupid's bow. Her hair was curled in swirling locks about her face, hiding her ears most of the time, but when they were visible they were as fine to look at as any sea-carved shell. Her skin was naturally creamy and took a delicate tan from the sun, like ever-so-light coffee. And it was the face you would never see on a magazine, because it was too alive and individual, unlike the death-mask criterion of feminine facial beauty pushed by popular women's magazines which try to convince every woman in America she can be beautiful if she just buys enough junk to put on her face to make her look like everyone else, which is good for the economy but which is also why many GI's marry foreign girls once they've been overseas. Who wants to go to bed with a somewhat greasy statue when with a Bttle effort you can find yourself a woman whose face tells you what you're doing when you make love to her?
As if this weren't enough, Jeanette had the kind of body that makes knit swim suits look passionate. Her cleavage alone would give you ideas. You could get very inventive, thinking about her cleavage. As I had, more than once. Her breasts were big and heavy and wide spread, with just the slightest bit of droop that is the inevitable accompaniment of heaviness. Not at all pendulous, but capable of swaying if yon shook her shoulders back and forth. That was fun to watch. The nipples were large and brown with wide spreading aureoles to support them. The slope and texture of her breasts was unflawed, except for a tiny mole on the underside of the left hemisphere. A place my lips had sought many times. It was our little joke.
"Let me kiss your love mark," I would say to her at night, waking her up with the familiar urgency.
"Do, darling-"
And I would.
There were many more delights, further down. If a woman has not gone to flab, she has muscles underneath that soft padding of flesh, and Jeanette's muscle tone was superb. Underneath her breasts it was all softly descending firm and graceful contours, down to her narrow, drawn-in waist, then out again in fine firm pads that developed into hips. The dips and hollows along the way were made for kisses. There was not a mark in them.
Legs. Long, graceful stalks; pedestals that supported the loveliness of her torso with proportionate beauty. The way dancer's legs are supposed to be, but unmarred by the excessive muscularity of professional dancer's legs. You could run your hand down them, feel their firmness, and never meet with an unexpected bulge or tightness or unsmooth line. You could run your lips down them and discover the same thing, and run up again, the backs this time, pausing at the soft hollows in the backs of her knees, then on up until you discovered something else.
Buttocks is a poor word. It sounds too clinical, too disinterested-but what other word is there to use? A woman has them, and Jeanette had them better than most women. They were big without being ponderous; high-rising mounds that dared you to do many things, that made a frontal approach a tactical error, at certain times. I've always thought a woman's buttocks the best part of her anatomy. Jeanette's were two of the many reasons why I had married her. Two of the most prominent, that is. More than once in our marriage, walking up behind her as she bent over the kitchen sink, doing dishes, had driven me wild. More than once, the dishes didn't get done for a while. I was almost sorry when we got the automatic dishwasher, but there were other opportunities.
Well, that's Jeanette. I've left things out, of course. You can't describe everything with words. Words trip you up when you come to some things. You start talking about those things, and it's just words. You have to feel them.
I dropped the empty crimped beer can in a wastebasket on the way through the living room. It clanked noisily. Jeanette is also a good housekeeper, the kind that abhors leaving anything in the bottom of a wastebasket. Our house wasn't the most expensive money can buy, but she kept the beige wall-to-wall carpeting freshly vacuumed, the white and pastel walls free of kid's fingerprints, the ashtrays empty and the hardwood floors waxed. These things she insisted on doing herself even though we could well afford to have a girl come in and do them for her. It's the way she was brought up, I guess. The first of seven children, she was not the average modern girl who is never required to lift a finger, who is trained from childhood up to expect everything to be done for her.
She was a hell of a good wife.
Jealous?
Don't be. I would have traded her gladly right then for a certain young girl on a bicycle.
I went into the bedroom, closing the door after me. The kids were asleep, but I was always careful about closing doors anyway. Doors too easily make windows for little people, when they are open.
Jeanette was on our bed, reading. The cone of light from her bed lamp over her head fell across her bare shoulders and lovely, negligee-encased breasts, making deep valleys of shadows. Her shortie negligee was twisted between her thighs, and I looked at them clinically. She saw me looking but pretended not to see. It was a little game of hers, exciting as hell if you were in a mood to be excited. I wasn't-
I just stared at her thighs and tried to imagine how they had looked when she was in her teens.
That's insane. You don't look at thighs like those and think about anything except caressing them. But I was. I was wishing those voluptuous breasts were smaller, harder, the body not quite so full.
I was wishing she was June.
Jeanette was wishing for something, too. She had stayed up for me and now she was pretending to read, hoping I would get excited watching her, wanting something she had not had much of in the last two weeks. She didn't like reading in bed.
I began undressing. She looked up.
"Hello," she said, "I thought you were never coming."
"Just taking the night air."
"Umm. How was it?"
"Fine."
She waited for me to say something else, make conversation, but I didn't, so she went back to her reading. She crossed her long bare legs casually and a calendar couldn't have made a prettier picture. The calf of her left leg was flattened out against her right knee, exaggerating its already well-curved contour. Any man wouldn't have hesitated.
I turned toward the dresser and finished unbuttoning my shirt. Then I pulled it off and after that the tee shirt went with it. I balled them up and tossed them in the corner behind the door, which always annoyed her, but I wasn't thinking. I had to sit on the bed to take off my shoes. My weight caused her leg to brush against me and she left it there, but I ignored it. I untied my shoes, pulled them off, dropping them on the floor, and then my socks, balling them up and tossed them in the direction of the shirt.
"I wish you wouldn't do that, Bill," she said, frowning.
I got a hangar from the closet and hung my pants over it and put them up on the bar. I had only my shorts on then, and I saw her give me a quick glance over the top of the paperback book she was reading, something called A Sound of Distant Druids. The glance must have disappointed her. There wasn't a thing doing with the shorts.
I took them off and went to bed.
It was a hot night and I didn't bother getting under the sheet. I just lay there, my fingers laced behind my head, thinking of nothing, waiting for her to say something.
I didn't have to wait long. She folded the book shut, placed it on the nightstand, and turned to me, one hip raised attractively. "Bill...." she began.
"Okay," I said, "what is it?" I knew damn well what it was and the trouble she was going to have saying it. Married nine years and she still had trouble saying things like that. It was odd to find such modesty coming from someone who looked so nakedly immodest in bed.
Her eyes lowered. "Bill honey, I-is there anything I can do for you, darling?" Her lips had just the tiniest bit of tremble. They wore a beseeching expression.
"No, Jeanette. I'm just tired, I guess."
She thought about that. Then she turned her eyes to my face again, a serious, concerned look in them this time. "You've been working awfully hard lately, haven't you dear?"
"Yeah, I guess you'd say so."
"Maybe too hard?"
"What makes you say that?" I had to be careful.
"It's just that, well, lately you don't seem to want to-"
"To make love?" There, it was out in the open now. It was scurrying around in the underbrush beneath the bed; the flushed animal was right there in bed with us.
She colored. But it didn't last long. She gave me a long, serious look and then she said "All right, Bill-that's it I want you to make love to me. I want it bad and I want it tonight. Do you think I can just lie here and look at you and not want it? I'm a woman, Bill-your wife-remember?"
"I never said you weren't."
She sat up in bed then, pulling the afterthought of a nightgown over her head, revealing her plump, firm, dark-nippled breasts. The nipples were distended with passion.
"Yes, I'm your wife. Look at me, Bill. I'm your wife, but I'm still a woman, aren't I?"
"Yes," I breathed. She was quite a woman, and I couldn't help admiring her, admiring the gesture she made of cupping her breasts as if to make the point of her argument. She was quite a woman, there was no contesting that.
"Bill, we've been married a long time. It's been good, too; a very good time for me, and I've always thought it was for you, too."
"It still is," I said, guiltily.
"Then what is it, Bill? Can you tell me what's bothering you? Because lately you haven't been acting as though it still is."
"It's ... nothing."
"You're looking at me, Bill. I can feel your eyes on my breast just as though they were hands. Doesn't it interest you to look at me anymore, Bill?"
"Sure it does. I told you I was tired, dammit!"
I might just as well have slapped her. Her face didn't change, but I could see the hurt in those large sensitive eyes. And then the hurt was gone, replaced by determination.
"All right, darling," she said in a low, hushed voice. "But I still want it. I ache here for it." And she showed me with her hand where she meant
"Well, maybe I-"
"You won't have to do anything, Bill. Just leave ft all to me. Lie back and leave it to me, darling-I'll make you good for me and then it will be good for you."
What could I do? I said "All right."
She began by touching my legs. With just her fingertips, she trailed tickling little paths of pleasure down my legs. It felt very nice. I wasn't really excited by it, but it was getting better and better.
"Do you like that, Bill?"
"Yes."
She didn't say anything more. Her hands went to my chest then, playing little games, and then traveling back downward with the circling motion again.
There is a word for what she was doing. A funny word that doesn't sound too sexy by itself, but the only word I can think of to describe it-
Exquisite.
Her fingers were entrancing; scintillating little scimitars that cut toward the root of my being. Touched it, arousing a fullness of desire that had not been there before.
"You're excited now, aren't you Bill!" she breathed, bending close in humble adoration of what she had wrought. "You're a man again!" I was.
"Don't move. I'm not finished. I'm going to make you want love."
I relaxed; that is, just about every part of me relaxed. She wanted to have her way with this, and now I was enjoying it. Extremely. I reached out toward the nightstand, got a cigarette, and lit it. I smoked. And all the time I smoked, she was busy. It was really funny when I thought about it. I was getting a first class treatment, the kind you'd have to pay extra money for in any respectable whorehouse.
From my wife.
And it was working. It was working like all hell. She was using her lips now, and doing things just about as exciting as that kind of thing can get.
Which is pretty exciting.
And somehow, smoking while she did it increased the excitement of the whole illusion. It's hard to explain, but I was somehow detached from it all, observing, and that made it all the better. Apart from the physical sensations she was making me feel, it was a great big kick watching my wife make a cheap, back alley tramp of herself.
Her lips circled in, the way her hands had before. Circled in, avoided, and then circled in again, little nipping kisses.
And then they didn't avoid anymore. I almost gagged on the smoke in my throat when they stopped avoiding.
I called her a word then. A very insolent word you don't call your wife. I said it in a low, clear voice, articulating all syllables. Her long chestnut locks brushed me as she twisted her head so she could look at me.
I took another puff on the cigarette, exhaled the smoke slowly, and repeated the word.
The expression in her eyes was inscrutable. It was far away, dreamy, and could have meant almost anything. But she resumed what she had been doing and soon she had fulfilled her promise.
And then, when she felt the desire in me, she shifted on the bed. Her weight leaned forward until I could sense the scent of her perfumed breasts, then back again, and I was there.
At first it was not much; just the slow rolling motion of her against me.
She was my wife again and I was making love to her again, the way I had countless nights since the day we were married. But something about it, about the way she was doing it, began to change things.
I closed my eyes until all I could see was a vision in blue shorts, above me.
After that, it was fun.
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning was Saturday and I remembered I'd promised to take the kids to the beach. It's one of those things you get into and there's no really graceful way of getting out of. Once you make the promise, they never forget. I was about to go back under the covers and try when Joey bounded into the room and made it impossible.
"Hey Dad! Ya ready to go to the beach?" I should have named him Dennis. He had a shock of blond hair, like mine, and the energy of a small atomic pile. He buzzed around the room, jumping and yelling until he had awakened Jeanette, whose scolding glance finally made him retreat back out of the bedroom. But he had made his point. I had just decided it was all a big mistake and was shrugging the sheet back over my shoulder when I felt Jeanette's hand shake me gently.
"Bill," she said, "You promised. They've both been looking forward to it all week."
I groaned, snorted, and gave up. I got out of bed.
Just as a warm shower awakens the mind, so a cold shower awakens the senses. I took both. I climbed in the stall, and though it was already a warm July day, let the hot water steam open my pores and wash away any invisible layers of cells mixed with the grit of dried sweat, some of which was Jeanette's. Then the cold water goaded my morning reluctant mind to alertness, or at least that degree of animal awareness required to greet a new day with the amount of optimism that is a new day's due. Thoughts of the previous day's internecine soul struggles were likewise eroded away under the needle sharp sting of the water, and I was soon in a frame of mind cheerful enough to greet the prospect of a day at the beach with my two highly animated offspring with a measure of complaisance, if not exactly joyful anticipation. With me, a morning shower is a ritual of regeneration, a shedding of the old and a preparation for the new.
Alas, this feeling does not last.
Jeanette was likewise preparing Joe and Wendy.
She herself was not going with us, having previously committed herself to a visit to a former school friend of hers who had recently moved to the city. She washed them and dressed them and fed them and patted them on the head, kissed me, and we were off for the wilds of eastern Long Island.
There I was, left with my two children and a merry day at the Reis Park Beach ahead of me. Heigh ho and away to the sea!
I took one little hand in each of mine and we went, a squirming threesome, to the corner bus stop. Jeanette had taken the Chevy with her to Long Island, so we were left in the hands of the public transit system for the day. The kids couldn't have cared less. A bus ride was for them an added attraction rather than an annoying nuisance to be borne with good naturedly, as it was with me. We waited on the corner a few minutes till the lumbering green vehicle hove in sight. We got on.
Fortunate day! The bus was for some reason unknown to me crowded with morning people who bad found reasons of their own to be up and about so early on a hot Saturday. What these reasons were shall forever remain a mystery to me. But such an inconvenience turned instead into an advantage. A very unexpected advantage, for me. There was not room for the three of us to sit together. I put Joey and Wendy into a seat together, and took one behind them myself-next to a very lovely young girl.
Shall I say I didn't notice her at first? But I did. Yes, to confess the truth, I noticed her the minute I walked onto the bus. In a casual way, of course. The bus was crowded. The eye observed, registered approval, and the rest was pure accident. Maybe. I could have stood up for the trip, holding on to the chrome metal post in a stance of patriarchal protectiveness next to my two wards. But I sat down.
She had a very innocent face. Not like an angel's-her hair was jet black rather than blond-but otherwise close to it. She wore a blue knit jersey, the kind that consists mostly of two straps and a circling swath of material, and her little breasts pushed out of it in a contradictory gesture that was timid and bold. Timid because she was not yet sure whether they were worthy of being publicized, bold because she was proud she had them. Most girls her age would have considerably less protrusion in that particular area. I figured her to be about fourteen. She had on shortie shorts, also blue, which creased very nicely where her thighs made the little vee so interesting to look at when the thighs are slightly revealed, as hers were.
I sat next to her. The bus left the curb with monoxide flatulence, jolting us out into the stream of traffic and on our way.
I noticed the large black pocketbook she had stuffed between herself and the side of the bus. A beach towel peeked from its open maw.
I got up my courage, turned to her and smiled.
"Going to the beach?"
She turned to me and smiled. Bless her, she had a dimple in one cheek. And limpid eyes of blue and a ribbon through her hair. "Yes," she said.
Which didn't leave me much of an opening. Perhaps I stared a trifle too hard at her lightly browned legs because she turned her face away from me and stared out the window again and our brief affair had terminated. So it seemed.
I was determined not to let it terminate that way if I could help it. I wanted badly to start a conversation. Any kind of conversation. The girl sitting next to me was as sweet as a sigh, and I wanted desperately not to have the sigh escape my lips. In front of us, my two kids were playing games, naming makes of cars as they went by, unaware of the tense drama going on in the seat behind them.
Already I adored the girl next to me. Adored? I worshipped her. The soft downy cheek, the bud-like lips of her face, all her charms became material for my wild fancies.
It was starting again-
I played games with her. All kinds of fantasy games. I stripped her clothes off her, kissed her tiny breasts and ravaged her mouth with my lips. I loved her body with my hands, felt the tender tremble of her as my fingers sought the frontiers of her, secreted away from my desiring eyes beneath her shorts. All this I did to her and much, much more, without her ever knowing.
The bus lurched in to the next stop, and she swayed against me, sending panic through my blood. The sweet perfume of her youth sewed tendrils of desire in me; a gentle ache that would have been satisfied with just a small caress, the touch of her arm against mine. I had to do something. I knew that I was mad to think such things, that I had to summon up the kind of control every normal man is supposed to have. But the knowledge was a poor bit in the mouth of my abnormal desires.
I had to find some excuse to touch her.
"Do you go to the beach often?" I said as the bus started up again.
"No. Mother doesn't like me to go because I get sunburned so easily." She began to wax conversational. "I wish I didn't. I love the ocean. I could swim in it forever-it's so exquisite. But mother says my skin is too fair and that if I come back with a sunburn again this time I won't be able to go again ever."
Sunburn? That the sun should ever so desecrate that tender, resilient young skin.
"Have you ever tried lotion?" I suggested, my eyes coveting her lovely lips.
She nodded, never pausing in her cud-like working over of the gob of gum in her mouth. It was fascinating for me to watch. I have heard other adults bemoan the adolescent urge to mash molars furiously in public, but to me it was a perfectly charming activity to observe. The smooth mechanical workings of her well formed jaw were a symphony played in a minor key, striking chords of eager response in my own now taut heartstrings. As she chewed around her words their meaning was lost on me; I could only dwell on the loveliness of those young full lips and imagine the sweet taste they would present to mine-the minty taste of youth's fresh bloom curled on a darting pink tongue.
"Lotion is very good," I advised with adult wiseness, "But of course it is also difficult to apply without someone's help."
"I know. Barbara-that's my girl friend-she usually comes to the beach with me and we put it on each other. You know, on our backs. But she's sick today with a cold and didn't want to come so I guess I'll just have to do as best as I can without her. Only I really hate the thought of getting burned there. Mother's such a drag about things like that."
"Well." I said, holding my breath at this, my major ploy, "If you'd like I can help you. We're going to the beach too, you know, and I have put it on Wendy-my little girl. She burns easily."
"Gee, would you?"
"Of course. If you're not meeting friends, maybe you'd like to swim with us. I'll have all I can do to watch both of them by myself. I'd really appreciate your help."
"Well-yeah, I guess there's nothing wrong with that. My name's Sami Weinstein."
The inner tension relaxed. I smiled a friendly, boyish smile as I told her mine. I knew the fantasies I was entertaining about Sami were impossible, but the knowledge of an afternoon full of casual inti-micies, the inevitable little contacts of sea-cool naked skin, the brushings and touchings and water collisions-this was enough to buoy up my spirits, once the initial incursion in my battle had been won. Perhaps I had hopes of something more, but I did not allow myself to entertain them consciously. As the bus jolted us along toward Flatlands Ave, I thought only of a glorious afternoon in the sun with my dark haired little ocean nymph. Just us and a bottle of suntan lotion. And, of course, Joey and Wendy. They would be there too. Of course.
Fortunately, Wendy took immediately to Sami. Their hands clasped in a moist concoction of instant friendship as we got off to change buses at Flatlands. Joey's view of the whole situation was somewhat different. He thought all girls, including such delectable specimens as Sami, were a condition of life to be put up with protestingly. "Is she going to be hanging around us all afternoon?" he frowned, looking up at me with an expression that was meant to be very much man-of-the-world.
"Quiet!" I said, pinching his arm as we got on the next bus. That kind of thing had to be controlled fast.
During the last leg of our lemming-like rush to the sea, I was disappointingly excluded from the merry band of oceancides. They found seats together; I stood alone, chafing under the ill luck which robbed me of the tender nearness of Sami. I resolved there and then to write a letter to the Times condemning the overcrowded condition of all public conveyance. If they can't find more seats for buses, let's turn them all over to the Freedom Riders, I say. Sami and the Ramsen children got along famously, however, and by the time we reached the end of the line, the last brick in their monumental friendship had been cemented. As for me, I was already jealous of Sami's attentions.
That was the extent to which my delirium had already driven me; I was eyeing my own children with jealousy as they talked and played with Sami-and the day had just started. Where would it end? Only the gods knew, and maybe they were angry gods. I had to control myself. To commit hubris on a sunny afternoon by the sea was not my idea of the way for Bill Ramsen to end up. Not twenty year's worth.
Okay, I could be sober too. I could play it that way. The trouble is, the whole thing was liable to run away with me at any time. I was afraid of myself, of the emotions I was capable of every time I looked at the backs of Sami's legs as she walked ahead of me, one of my children's hands clasped in either of hers. A thousand times I've seen the legs of young girls, girls like Sami; seen the young resilient untried flesh of them, sullied that fantasy with my mind. Seen them and thought the same thoughts and then walked on my merry way, thinking they might as well be on Mars.
But Sami wasn't on Mars.
She was a young daughter of Venus, and she was walking right in front of me, strutting those pretty pins with thoughtless desire, and I was going out of my mind. I was half regretting that I had spoken to her, made the first connection.
But the other half of me wasn't regretting.
The other half of me was-well, I had to control myself.
It was not easy. I had to avoid looking at her, and that was not easy. I looked everywhere else there was to look; at cars, stores, the sidewalk; even at other girls. But they were all much less interesting to look at than was Sami, and my eyes kept wandering back to the hemline of her much too short shorts. The shorts ended where her buttocks did not quite end, and that was torture to which I consigned myself during the time it took to walk the rest of the way to the beach. To looking at the sweet foothills of a land my hands longed to explore. Dante had neglected to include this torture in his Inferno. But what would the foothills be doing in Hell?
At last, picking our way through flatulent traffic in our shoreward pilgrimage, we reached the beach. It was, needless to say, crowded. It was, needless to say, noisy. But I was thankful for both conditions, as they enabled me to hide my secret sins in the anonymity of screaming children and the monotony of exposed flesh scattered in protoplasmic clusters along the sand.
Sami took Wendy and I took Joey to the beach house, where we split up through doors marked respectively MEN and WOMEN. Both children already had their suits on under their clothes, which would have facilitated matters had I been alone with them as planned, but since Sami was now one of the group, out of deference to her we went through the more customary ritual of disrobing in the smelly locker rooms.
"Daddy," Joey said, "You'll go swimming with me, won't you?" His meaning was obvious.
"We'll all go swimming together," I said sternly "Aw heck-who wants to go swimming with girls?"
I had an answer for that, but I thought it unwise to deliver it at that time. Six or seven years later would be time enough. Instead I said "Never mind that, son, it's up to you and me to protect your little sister. After all, she can't swim as good as us, can she?"
He thought about that a minute. "Nah, but can't Sami look after her?"
"True, but then who's going to look after Sami?"
"Well...."
"Right you are. We've got to be men about this, Joe. Remember that."
"Yeah, I guess you're right there, Dad."
Having conquered his protests with my inexorable logic, we hastened to rendezvous with our female wards. Quite predictably, we exited from the beach house ahead of them and had to wait. It was past mid-morning; the full heat of the day had not yet made itself felt, but the sun was fast approaching its zenith, and already the sand was hot under our bare feet. We waited impatiently, but at last they appeared in the doorway of the homely cinder block building, dressed for a swim and bundled down with beach things. They trundled their way down to us, two diminutive nymphs, picking their way through the flotsam strewn sand, joined us, and together the four of us began our search for the chimerical goal of all beachgoers: an isolated spot on the beach.
There was none. We had to settle finally for an area wedged between a fat lady under an umbrella and two young lovers obviously bent on trading each other's acne. The fat lady seemed to be asleep. Her enormous spread legs pointed vaguely upword, encased like fat sausages in her mourning black suit--obviously mourning what it had to encase. Her pasty white flesh was exposed to the sun, which must have shifted since she had first dozed off, because the shadow now extended from the back of the umbrella. She didn't realize it in her undisturbed slumber, but she was in for one hell of a time salving all that ponderous flesh. By the time she trucked it home, it would be beet red. I thought about waking her up, but decided not to. Her umbrella gave us a nice shadow in which to he down. Better to let sleeping dogs lie, I thought sanctimoniously, as I spread our beach cloth on the yellow sand. It made a pretty pattern of reds, yellows and blues, gaudy and gay in the shadow of the fat woman's umbrella.
But not so pretty as my Sami. She had on a white bathing suit. Whiter than her skin it was, a tight elastic material that stretched across her thighs and made them bulge out in white lined flesh where the suit ceased to cover them. She sat next to me, removing her things from her mammoth pocketbook; a makeup kit, a comb, a movie magazine, a pocket transistor radio, and other girlish paraphenalia. Her little breasts stuck out under the top of the bathing suit high and proud, and when she leaned over to help Wendy with her things, I could see the first signs of a charming cleavage. One day it would become a gorge, no doubt, but right now it-was just an indication of uprisings to come. I fancied her breasts would be pert and pretty and well fitted to the palm of a hand. My hand, I hoped, though I struggled to keep the thought from arousing me to the point of embarrassment.
Wendy said, "You gonna take me swimmm', huh?"
Sami said, "Sure, when we get settled, hon."
Joey said, "I wanna go swimming now!"
I said, "You wait for your sister. She's got to have lotion on or she'll burn and blister, and you better have some on yourself. If I bring either of you home burned, we're all in for it."
"I'll put it on them," Sami said.
"Okay. The bottle's in the beach bag. And then I better put some on you, too, while we're at it." My heart was in my throat while I said it.
Sami gave me a funny look and my heart crawled up another choking inch, but she didn't say anything. She spread the lotion on Wendy's little back, rubbing it in, and then she put some on Joey, who squirmed impatiently under the ordeal. When she was finished, they both had a shiny coat of oil on them and were ready to rush down to the water.
"Okay," I said, "You can go down to the edge of the water near the lifeguard, but don't go in until Sami and I get there." They sprang like horses at the starting gate. "And Joey, you watch Wendy." I yelled after them. And they were gone, down to the water's edge where we could watch them.
I picked up the bottle of lotion and turned to Sami.
"Lotion?"
The funny look again. "Well ... Yeah, I guess I better."
"Here," I smiled, pointing to the beach towel. "Lie down-it's painless."
She lay down on her stomach, her neat round buttocks upturned to me. I knelt beside her, trying to keep my hands from shaking, my breath from sounding like a man who has just run the four minute mile. She cradled her pretty head on her arm, turning her face away from me. I tilted the bottle and the oily liquid dripped into my palm. I sat the bottle down carefully and rubbed my palms together. Where to start? My hands trembled.
'You can just get the back," she said, her voice muffled by her arm, "I'll get the rest."
"Don't worry, I'll take care of it."
Her skin was warm, very warm under my hands. I let my palms slide over her shoulders gently at first, in little circular motions, soothingly. Her flesh tingled my fingers with excitement, and were it not for the thin layer of oil, might have been uncontrollable I slid them around, over her shoulders and neck over the thin ridged wings of her shoulder blades, so delicately and exquisitely formed.
Her flesh was a song under my hands, a song of youth. If the excitement in my fingers communicated itself to her, she did not seem to mind. I began to pat and roll her smooth flesh, to knead it daringly with my fingers, and still she said nothing.
I became more daring.
My hands went down to the backs of her legs. I left them there, motionless, holding my breath.
"Well, what are you waiting for?"
"I ... I need more lotion," I said quickly. I reached for the bottle, too fast. My hand knocked it over. What was left in it sank in the hot sand and vanished as I watched with horror.
She turned on one hip to see what had happened.
All right, I was flustered. A stupid little accident like that had broken the careful spell I had been in, that I had hoped to put her in. I could have stood up and shouted curses up and down the whole goddamned beach.
"I-I'm sorry," I stammered, like a fool, "The bottle spilled."
She looked at me with those big limpid eyes, a deadly solemn look that made me, a thirty-year-old man, want to dig a hole in the sand and crawl in it.
And then she smiled. Her smile broke into a grin and the grin was accompanied by a giggle.
"You're funny!" she said. "Why did you stop? It was just beginning to be fun. You don't need any of that old gook on your hands if you want to touch me."
I was stupefied. I looked at her, my jaw working but no words coming out, and she just lay there and laughed.
"You don't mind "
Her eyes narrowed. "Listen mister, if you want to feel me up, okay, only just let's not play games about it, huh? If I didn't want you to do it I wouldn't have let you pick me up on the bus like that."
"Then you knew...."
"Oh, Christ, what do you think I am. dumb or something? I know what a man wants when he practically pushes me through the side of the bus to get a good feel."
There were a lot of things I could have done then. I could have slapped her and told her to get home and grow up. I didn't particularly like to be made a fool of, to be toyed with by a fourteen-year-old slut.
The hell I didn't.
She could toy with me all she wanted to.
I knelt over her again and began massaging, this time my fingers not hesitating to go up under her bathing suit.
CHAPTER THREE
The next day was Sunday and I went for a walk.
It was not yet noon, which meant the bars were not open, which meant there was nowhere to walk to, not for another hour at least.
So I just walked.
I walked over to Avenue L and up it. It was July and it was hot and there wasn't anything particularly interesting in walking up Avenue L, except that it was only a block that I had to walk, which made it better. I saw people, some churchgoers dressed uncomfortably for church in summer clothes that were supposed to make them comfortable but didn't. Some orthodox Jews with long beards the color of old rust and looking like Spanish Moss hanging from their faces, except for the color, passed me on the sidewalk and I nodded to them, for no special reason. They looked like they felt even hotter than I did, so I nodded to them, don't ask me why. One of them nodded back. I saw some old Italian ladies dressed uncomfortably for church and I saw their daughters, dressed in cool frothy summer dresses and I didn't nod at them but I looked and admired the way they were managing to look cooler than anyone else that day. Young girls with dark hair and good skin and good legs they were, and I loved them with my eyes and passed on.
What I wanted was a bar. But, as I said, no bars would be open for an hour so I walked on. I turned right at the intersection and walked east on Rock-away Parkway. There was not much to see there either; just people, walking the other way mostly, to church or someplace. Wherever it is people walk on Sunday morning. I didn't ask.
Well, I kept walking east of Rockaway Parkway until there wasn't any more Rockaway Parkway and I had to stop walking or else I would have ended up in Jamaica Bay, which I didn't want to do because I would have been arrested, the water being polluted and no swimming allowed. I sat down on the edge of Canarsie Pier and looked at the water and the tangible evidence of pollution floating around in it and when I got tired of that I watched an old man patiently fishing, casting out his line and bringing it in with nothing on it and casting it out again. That got boring.
So I lit another cigarette and thought about Sami Weinstein.
That did it. I needed a drink in the worst way then, and I saw by my watch it would be another half hour before I could get one. I had booze home in the wall cabinet, but I didn't want to drink there. Not and think about Sami Weinstein.
Which was something I had to do. There wasn't a place far enough away to walk to that would keep me from thinking about Sami. Not Canarsie Pier and not Timbuctoo. Not anywhere.
I'd had my fingers on her.
That's all. Just my fingers there up under her bathing suit, for about five minutes; greedily touching under the elastic material.
That was enough-
More than enough, it was, to elevate me from the weather-beaten wood of the pier edge and head barward down Rockaway Parkway again. I had Sami ants again, and they were nibbling me. They nibbled voraciously, goading me all the way down Rockaway Parkway in the direction I had come.
I passed Avenue L and kept walking, four blocks further until I came to George's place.
George is an anomaly. A short, compactly powerful man in his early forties, he had a deceptively soft spoken manner which occasionally led teenage punks new in the neighborhood into the mistake of thinking he was a pushover. It was a mistake they made only once. George had a black belt in judo. He had single-handedly cleaned a gang of five village hotheads out of his place once. Two of them had brandished knives, briefly. They had gone through the door without them. After that episode, the kids came in with their draft cards and an air of respect. George ran a very nice bar and served good beer. He was just opening up when I arrived. "Beer, Mr. Ramsen?"
He already had the glass in his hand and I nodded, not wanting to interrupt his adept motion as he reached for the tap. I could have used something stronger. But I had never ordered anything other than beer in George's place, and to do so would have involved changing his whole image of me. I didn't want that to happen.
I felt guilty enough as it was about what I was going to do.
"How's the missus," George asked, setting the foam-tipped sweating glass on the bar in front of me.
"Fine. How's business?"
"The usual. Slow. Everybody's on vacation. The ones that ain't are crazy from the heat and ready for trouble. Don't know what to do with themselves in this weather, I guess."
"Yeah," I said, thinking he might as well be talking about me. What I was going to do was crazy too, whether from the heat or not, I didn't know. I tipped my glass to him and then drank, the cold beer clearing channels down my sandy throat. I drained the glass and pushed it toward George for another. There was no one else in the place yet
"Thirsty today, huh, Mr. Ramsen?"
"It's the heat, George."
"Yeah," he agreed solemnly, "It's going to be another scorcher."
That about exhausted our conversational ploys for the day. I drank the second beer more slowly, contemplating what I was going to do. There was a piece of paper in my wallet, a little piece of paper neatly folded in half. I was extremely conscious of that little piece of paper. I was sitting on it and it was burning a hole in my pants, right through the pigskin leather. There was nothing on the paper anyone would get particularly excited about if they saw it It was just a number.
Sami's number.
Me, I was pretty excited about it. If somebody had given me Brigitte Bardot's number, I couldn't have been more excited.
I was scared, too. The whole morning had been nothing more than a tug of war between me and that little piece of paper. I had tugged one way, toward Canarsie Pier, and the paper had tugged the other way.
The paper had won.
Here I was at George's, drinking beer and sneaking glances at the phone booth. I knew that in a couple of minutes, after one more beer, I would get up off that stool and go to the phone booth. I would go to it and I would take the piece of paper out of my wallet, the paper Sami had given me on the way home on the bus yesterday.
And then I would dial the number written on it.
Okay, I was a sap. I ordered the third beer and sipped it while I thought about what a sap I was. Sami Weinstein was a teen-ager and I was letting myself get hung up on her. Worse, maybe I was letting myself get hung, period. A girl who looked older and who had let me touch her up on a crowded beach, touch her lovely little body so I would want it so badly I'd do silly things like go to a bar on Sunday and drink enough beer to get up the nerve to call her, just like an adolescent. Which I was doing.
An elderly gent with a nicotine yellowed moustache came in and occupied George's attention long enough for me to slink off to the phone booth. I slunk and I dialed, the paper on the shelf in front of me.
An elderly voice answered. "Hello?"
"May I speak to Sami please?"
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Would you speak up please?"
"Sami. I'd like to speak to Sami."
"I'll see if she's up. Who should I say is calling?"
I thought wildly, fighting off panic. "Wendy's brother, Joe," I said quickly, holding my breath afterward.
"Who? Oh, never mind, hold the phone." The voice seemed cross, as if calk from strange people were an abuse it grudgingly had resigned itself.
I waited, tapping nervously on the receiver with my fingers. What should I say to her? I know that my position was ridiculous, that I had already once made a fool of myself in her eyes, that I was probably acting worse than the school kids who called her for dates, but my observation had driven me beyond the limits of retreat. Whatever happened now didn't matter. I was ready to sell my soul for any favors she would deign to bestow on me. I waited and sweated in the coffin-like confines of that phone booth for what seemed like an eternity, and at last her puerile tones came playfully from the receiver cradled in my sweaty palm.
"This is Sami."
"Can you talk?"
"I just said 'This is Sam?.' didn't I?"
"Don't get snotty." There was a limit. "Who is this?"
"Bill."
"Bill who?"
"From the beach. Yesterday. You gave me your number."
"Did I?"
She was going to be cute about it. I choked back my anger and tried to calm myself. I wanted to wring her neck. But more than that, I didn't want her to hang up on me.
"Look Sami," I said-patiently, I hoped, "Please don't play games now. You gave me your number and I called it and now I want to talk to you."
"Okay, hold on." I fancied I heard her gum pop, though it might have been my imagination, which was constantly feeding on such images, and then the phone was silent again for a few minutes. But she hadn't hung up. I felt like a prisoner in murderer's row who had just been given a stay of execution. And at last, her voice piped up again.
"Okay, I'm in my bedroom now so we can talk."
"You sure no one's listening?"
"No," she giggled, "That was my grandmother. She's half deaf and the idea of listening in to somebody's conversation would shock her out of her pants anyway. Did you call up for a date?"
I said I had, and I'm afraid my voice betrayed me when I said it. It was hoarse as hell.
"Well I don't know. I've never gone out with married men before."
"You gave me your number," I argued.
"I know. You're kind of cute and I thought it would be fun. But if my parents ever found out...."
"Where are they?" I said tensely.
"They're up in the mountains on vacation. They wanted me to go with them but I didn't want to go. It's more fun being here, when they're away."
"What about tonight?" I said, trying to keep the urgency out of my voice.
"Well...."
"I have a car," I said, desperately trying to keep that note of interest in her voice. "We can go for a ride somewhere-to a drive-in if you want."
Her voice turned disdainful. "Drive-in's! I can get lots of boys to take me to drive-in's. And they won't be putting their hands up my dress all the time, either."
I squeezed the phone violently, imagining it was her neck. "All right," I said, "You name it and we'll go there."
She hesitated. The phone booth felt like a steam bath by now. But the sweat stinging my eyes was not all from the heat. My muscles ached and I felt a mild nausea in the pit of my stomach. It was insane to let her do this to me, but I was letting her do it.
"Tell you what," she said at last, "I'll have to think it over. Can you meet me downtown later-at the corner of Pitkin and Rockaway?"
"When?"
"Oh, around eight-no, make it seven. I can't stay out too late or my grandmother will be suspicious."
"I'll be there at eight."
"See you," she giggled, and hung up.
I slid out of the booth and up to the bar. Something of what I was feeling inside must have shown on my face, because George gave me a raised eyebrow as he drew another beer.
"Anything wrong, Mister Ramsen?"
"No," I answered. "Everything's fine, George. Just fine." I tilted my glass and drank thirstily.
I needed that one.
I needed the next one, too, and then a hooker of bar whiskey, which really raised George's eyebrows, and then I was ready to go home.
Home to the wife and kids.
It wasn't so bad walking home. I had five beers and a double shot of hardware under my belt and I didn't feel the heat. That is, I noticed it, took note of it the way you would a wart on your thumb, but didn't think about it, so it didn't bother me. I had plenty of other things to think about. I had the evening to think about, and already I was excited.
When I got there I could smell the after smells of a cooked Sunday dinner. Essence of pot roast lingering in the air. Sure enough, it was on the table and Jeanette was hovering in the wings, waiting for her loving audience to arrive and approve of her production. She kissed me, asked me how my walk had been, and if she smelled the whiskey on my breath, she said nothing. Wendy and Joey were already scraping chairs in the dining room, vying for first crack at the steaming twined chunk of government inspected Grade A beef succulently awaiting the first saggital incision from the honed blade of the master of the house.
A pretty domestic picture, eh?
I carved amid the kiddie clamor of spoons and knives while Jeanette beamed from the other end of the table.
We ate.
After dinner, Jeanette took the kids to the Sunday matinee at the local movie house, a sticky It-Came-From-Out-Of-The-Grease-Trap film, I think. I laid down on the sofa, trying to distract myself with the Sunday Times. I was slightly high and overfed and the tons of newsprint soon started to swim before my eyes and then I was asleep.
The Land of Lethe was populated with little nympholets, dancing nude on the rocks of a forest-glen stream. Half of them looked like Sami, dark-haired, smooth-limbed and creamy-fleshed. The other half looked like June, blond and nubile and agile buttocked. They cavorted and splashed in the water, little water maidens, putting on a Midsummer Night's Dream production, and I was none other than Puck. I was about to leap from my perch on the bank and join them in a very sportive manner when the Fairy Queen appeared, sounding a gong which scattered my throng of sprites away through the leafy foliage before I could pursue.
The gong was actually the doorbell. It took me a few seconds to realize this, to brush away the misty dream strands from my brain, before I was able to get up from the sofa and answer it. Even so, I was totally unprepared for the shock I was to get when I opened the front door of my home.
It was Sami.
I gaped. I gaped because it was Sami and this was my house, my sanctum sanctorum, my castle, and here she was, brazenly ready to cross the moat and invade, as if it were all in a day's work. I gaped because it was Sami and she was dressed in a scanty yellow halter which showed such nubile cleavage as she had, and a pair of yellow shorts which were even shorter than the pair I had seen her in yesterday, a pair of shorts which she should have given to her kid sister, if she had one seven years old.
Hell, I just gaped.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" she said in dulcet tones.
My mouth worked mechanically. "What are you doing here?"
"Like I'm standing on your doorstep, mister, waiting for you to ask me in."
I let her in.
CHAPTER FOUR
"What are you doing here?" I said again. It was a stupid thing to say. I had already let her into the living room, which meant I wanted her here. Which was even stupider. I should have told her to go play in a crowded street. Anything. But instead I asked the yellow shorts and halter and bare midriff to come into my living room.
She ignored the question and looked around the room, her young eyes doing a good imitation of a lax appraiser. I felt as though her clever little brain was making rapid calculations, assessing everything, reducing physical objects which had become a part of two people's lives to mere figures. She probably already had me placed in the proper income bracket, for all I could tell.
"Nice place you got here," she said.
"Nice place my wife has here," I mimiced. "Now how about telling me where you got the bright idea you could just walk into my home like this without any invitation?"
She managed to look hurt. I was fast becoming a skeptic about Sami's moods and expressions, but I had to admit she was good at it. She was a very good little actress, especially with a captive audience. Me.
"I just wanted to tell you I can't go out with you tonight," she said.
"Don't they teach you kids about Alexander Graham Bell's wonderful invention anymore? I suppose you found me through the phone book."
"Yeah," she admitted. "I didn't have nothing to do so I decided to walk over."
"I see. You just decided to walk over. And what, pray tell, would you have done if my wife had answered the door, instead of me?"
She shrugged. The question was, after all, academic. My wife hadn't answered the door. And she obviously didn't have the type of mind that was interested in hypothetical problems.
"Gee, I bet this sofa cost a lot of money," she said, sitting down on it.
"I declared myself a nation and got it on government loan," I said. "Huh?" she said.
"Never mind," I said, annoyed that T had bothered. I was getting uneasy as hell. She had drawn her legs up under her on the sofa, kicking off her sandals first, in a flagrant defilement of the basic concept of private property. But that wasn't what was making me uneasy. Her taut-muscled thighs were as smooth as a peeled egg, and that was making me uneasy. She knew I was looking at them, but pretended not to notice. Yesterday's sun had done well by her thighs. They were a cross between tan and pink, and the hybrid was delectable to the eye. The rest of her was that color too, and just as delectable.
"I like your T.V. We have an old one. with one of those little screens. Yours is nicer. Where's your wife?" The last was delivered as an afterthought.
"She went to the movies with the children."
"Oh. That's good. The movie doesn't get out until five fifteen and it's only three o'clock. Don't you want to sit down next to me?"
She was right and I did. I tried to act composed about the whole thing, at least as composed as she was acting. Since I hadn't chased her away from my doorstep, there was little else I could do, and I wasn't about to chase her away then. Not by two long shots. I sat down next to her and she turned the smile on again, the sweet smile as old and virginal as Vesta and just as phony.
"You're not mad at me, are you? For coming."
"No," I said. And I wasn't; not at that moment. Her legs were still curled under her and her warm thigh rubbed mine and I could see the dimple in her cheek and if I was mad at her, I forgot about it. Her dark hair was close cropped in an Italian style cut and gave off a delicate fragrance that was part Wool-worth's and part hers. I let my arm hang loosely along the sofa in back of her, but didn't move. I just sat that way, in the exquisite, dreamy nearness of my dream dryad come true, letting a vague general sensuousness tingle the back of my neck, in waves, each tingle another link in the slave chain she was fastening around me without doing anything more than leaning closer and breathing.
"I'm glad you're not mad," she said finally. "I like you. You're pretty old, I guess. I mean with kids and all that. But you don't look so old. You know who you remind me of?"
"Who?"
"Tab."
"Tab?"
"Tab Hunter! Silly! You're sort of an old Tab Hunter I guess, and that's why I like you. He's so groovy and everything, if I had him here I'd love him all to pieces, I swear!" Her pink painted fingernails dug into my wrist to show me just how she would love him to pieces. When she took them away, there were little red marks and a sting more exciting than a kiss, and something in me leapt to life.
"Oooh!" she said. Her hand reached down then in an embrace so sweet and quick I had to lean forward. My arm went around her narrow shoulders and brought her close and I could feel her heart beating against mine as I began kissing her perfumed silk-soft hair.
"Now, Sami, I want you now," I breathed heavily.
But she jerked away from me.
"No. Not here."
She had me and she knew it. I began to protest, but it was no good.
"I want you on the bed," she repeated, "The way you do with your wife-or else I'm going home."
It was no time for argument. I got up, awkwardly, taking her by the hand. I led her to the bedroom that way, the way you would a child to the circus. I was in agony each step of the way.
The bed was king size and Sami made a diminuitive queen on it. She acted as if she had never seen anything so big. She lolled in it, frolicked and laughed and kicked her heels in the air.
"It's big!" she squealed, "Like an ocean of bed! Try and catch me!"
I lunged, but she was too quick. She rolled and tossed to the edge, and then slid off and pranced around the room in her bare feet looking at and touching everything, as though insane with the desire to possess. She was teasing me; I knew it; I let her. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat there, watching her.
She stood swaying in front of me now, putting on an act. The minx. Little Sami did a perfect imitation of a burlesque queen, rolling her hips and running her fingers down her sides to her thighs, then up over her front, watching me and laughing at me with her eyes all the time.
And then she reached in back of her deftly with one hand and the yellow halter fell to the floor like a spent butterfly.
She had breasts. Small, cherry-tipped breasts they were, large enough to cup.
She cupped them.
I restrained the impulse to leap from the bed and tried to look like the lecherous abnormal I felt like.
I tried to be Tab Hunter, with trimmings. I let my hair grow blonder and eight years slough away as I watched her body sway closer, almost to within my reach. Closer and closer the moth came to the candle.
Closer....
And then I grabbed. My arms went out and caught her by the waist and I drew her to me. She was all firm and warm, yet soft to the touch, and my head ducked down to her bare belly and my lips tasted the sweetness of her. My hands on her buttocks squeezed, locking her in a passion grip that took even her by surprise.
"Oh!" she said, "You're hurting."
But I paid no attention then; the teasing fly was in my trap, and I devoured her with my lips, wallowed in her while my hand hastily undid the buttons of the yellow shorts. Undid them and slid them down over her slim thighs. And then the panties, little nylon nothings that tore as I fumbled them down to her ankles.
I said things to her; crazy things which I don't remember, called her my nymph, my dryad, my child bride as I loved her with greedy hands, caressing her legs and thighs and breasts in motions that were separate and together at the same time, and I could feel her tremble with each caress.
Her hands were also busy. Oh, there was nothing about little Sami, once she had entered the fray! A small "O!" came from the small O of her lips.
A more gutteral sound came from mine. I seized her then round the waist and lifted her bodily onto the bed of my wife. I tore back the counterpane, the sheet, tore off the rest of my clothes, and came to her.
Like a starved bee seeking the blossom.
It was a struggle at first, but I soon realized little Sami was not inexperienced. Other bees had supped there. But not many. It was a struggle, but I threw myself onto it, and it was not long before I had established a good beachhead. She struggled also, and I felt her back arch as she gave a cry.
"Careful! You'll hurt me!"
I couldn't care, then. I was there, there In the forbidden land, and I had only the desire to explore further along the banks of that sweet lowland valley. I pushed on.
She cried again, but now she was moving, twisting, helping me. I kissed the dark, hair of her head again.
Again her cry.
On and on and on, and her little cries of surprised pain were like tinkling forest music in my ears. I said her name over and over again as I felt her lock around me.
"Sami, Sami, Sami, Sami . .
And then there was only the quick creaking of the bed and an infinity of rapid sensation as we climbed to the peak of the lava hot mountain and plunged over the edge into its molten liquid fire.
I breathed slowly, deep gulping afterbreaths of the sulpherous volcanic air, truly spent from the conquest of Sami.
"Get off, you're hurting," she said.
Tramp. Hadn't I been good for her? Had she no appreciation for my Herculian labors, my carnal ministrations to her? Judging from the redness of her face, I had had some effect on her, Tab Hunter or no. But all she could think to say was "Get off, you're hurting me!" I got off, pleasantly lax muscled bow, in the afterglow of desire. I studied her face. It was a child's face, but too much the mother of the woman. I had satisfied her in a way that was for her completely physical. Now all she wanted was to go back to her movie magazines, or whatever. I wanted to talk about it, to whisper words, compare notes, measure her responses against mine.
She wanted to go to the bathroom.
I let her go. She got up from the bed and walked her wiggling buttocked walk, now banal to my eyes, out of the room, and soon I could hear faucets running.
I remained on the bed, contemplating my changed state of affairs. There was a host of things I should be attending to; straightening the bed, hurrying Sami out of the house, erasing all signs of her presence from the eyes of my fastidious wife-but I felt no urgency then. Because I knew then that my life had come to a dividing point, of sorts; that my state of affairs, my reason for being was truly and inexorably changed by this act of descration of those vows, fictional in essence as they might be, held most holy at the time two people are joined together in sanctified monogamy.
It was not as if I had picked up a cheap whore. That would have been quite another matter. If monogamy works at all (which many disclaim), it works by virtue of just such provender to the wayward libidinous instincts of the male spouse, covertly sanctified by society and even the moralists; hence the survival of the institution of whoredom. But this was not the case. Technically, I had broken the vows already, on three different occasions. Two of them were during my wife's two pregnancies, when the urge to copulate had become too strong not to have ill effects on my temper and thereby my domestic tranquility.
I sought whores, and being a businessman, knew where to seek a better class of whore than those free lancers who roam Eighth Avenue and Times Square. It meant, on each occasion, nothing more to me than it would to a man who rents a field and plows it, the difference being there would be no yield of crop to harvest. I felt no pangs of guilt afterward.
If Jeanette had questioned me, I would have told her all, without suffering any pangs of remorse, but it was not in her nature to question me in such areas. She was one of those few good women who assume their husbands are virtuous as a matter of course, not because they are naive or fooled by their powers to charm or believe in the totems of middle class morality, but because it is simply best to do so in the face of men being what they are; because to do so insures a ninety percent faithfulness, which percentage would be considerably lowered by prying female jealousy. There are a few women like that. Damn few.
The third time was with an office girl after an office party, in said girl's apartment on Riverside Drive. Her name was Emily and she was a blond as amply endowed with the type of curves associated with blonds as she was devoid of anything approximating brains. She was good in the rack. But not as good as my wife, so I simply never took her up on the invitation for a return engagement. Even so, there has always been that certain smile between us. And the offer has been kept open by dint of her allowing me to press against her buttocks as she bends over the filing cabinet when there is no one else in the office. So much for Emily.
Little Sami was another matter altogether.
What she represented was something else again. Something febrile. A madness, a malady, a sun-touched sickness I had to get out of my system. A potential destruction of myself, perhaps, but a certain destruction of more than myself if I did not get it out of my system. It had grown in me like an encysted canker, for more than a year, gnawing into my mind, burrowing into my senses.
Now the canker was out.
No, that is a bad image. How can anything so sublime as bedding a Sami be compared with a disease? If disease was involved, the disease was me, and the tight-fleshed fulfillment of Sami was the cure.
The only cure.
I lit a cigarette and pondered these imponderables, listening to the musical water sounds coming from the bathroom. She was taking a shower. Fastidious little wench. Probably the home she lived in had no shower. She had been as impressed with my home as though it were the riches of Midas, unmortgaged. A gamin, a child of the streets she was, or close to it. But no-she'd said her parents were on vacation, which meant the wherewithal to take vacations. Perhaps. She was so facile in the art of lying that it could mean anything. I would have to be careful about her. I might even have to get rid of her. That would not be easy. She held the law over me, and who knew but what she might decide to exercise that law? I would have to convince her that the alternatives to keeping a closed mouth would be just as unpleasant for her as they would for me. Worse.
I heard the shower turn off. There was a silence and then the pad of bare feet back to the bedroom, and there was Sami, wrapped in one of my wife's large Turkish towels.
She went directly to my wife's dresser, where her hand sought among the many bottles there a decanter of cologne, which she proceeded to pat liberally around her neck and breasts. The towel slipped slowly from one full cheek of her behind as she worked, preoccupied with her mirror image.
And desire quickened in me again as I got up from the bed, my eyes riveted to the slow slip of the towel.
CHAPTER FIVE
Monday I neither saw nor heard from Sami.
I went to work. An idle mind is the devil's workshop, so my grandmother used to tell me. and the devil in mine was drawing overtime. Distasteful as my job had become, I sought to lose myself in it. A last grasp at the thin straw of salvation.
Work. Work is an office in Manhattan, on Fifty-Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue; a stone and steel and glass eyrie on the tenth floor, where the creaking monotonous whine of air conditioning almost capable of cooling the large room to livable temperature accompanies the dragging hands of a large electric IBM clock, doling out the morning with reluctance. Wort is a bore.
I have no idea why I ended up in the insurance game, except that at the time it seemed the thing to do. Other things would have suited me better-too late I found out. At an age neither young or old, I could still see myself as a self-styled poet haunting the espresso shops of lower Greenwich Village, or an oiler on a merchant ship bound for the Cote d'Azur.
I could see myself as many things, other than William Ramsen, agent for the Westfoco Agency, Insurance of All Kinds, Jonathan Dillworth, Mgr. Someday, about six or seven hundred days hence, perhaps, the sign would read William Ramsen, Mgr. Maybe. At two-thirty it would represent quite an achievement. Inner office of my own, sign on my desk, feather in my cap and all that. People, important people in insurance circles, saying "That boy's a real go-getter! Knew he'd make it, by George!" and then the invitations to cocktail parties and in a year or two a bid to join the Racquet Club and enough money to own a sports car and buy Jeanette one, too, if she wanted it.
Sure, the works.
It was laid out in front of me like a road map. All I had to do was follow the right signs. I didn't want it.
Oh, I wanted it vaguely, generally-the way everyone wants success. But like all men who are basically romantics, now that success was in sight, it was no longer the lush maiden of my young dreams. Now that I could make out the face of the Bitch Goddess, I could see she was a painted whore. An old painted whore. That was the part that was un-forgiveable, the old.
I was, for the time, done with old women.
That much Sami had taught me. It might have been a one shot deal, that afternoon spent with her in my bedroom. At least that's the way I had rationalized it afterward, when she had left and I was sweating the consequences of my dalliance, changing sheets and cleaning up, trying to hide every trace of her presence.
Now I knew better. It took me exactly an hour of staring at the same questionnaire on my desk to know better. My eyes travelled down it automatically. It was nothing more than a simple form sheet, of the variety I had used thousands of times since I had first taken the job with the agency. I knew every question on it by heart. It gave the pertinent information about the applicant; his health, social and financial background, occupation, hobbies, etc. The kind of thing that takes about two minutes to analyze, if you're experienced at it as I was. But I couldn't make any sense out of it. My eyes would get about halfway down and then I would forget everything I had just read and have to start all over. After a while I gave that up and just stared out the window.
And thought. I could see old Dillworth through the glass window of the inner office, his shaggy gray head bent over a desk cluttered with papers, charts and statistics, or talking on the phone. Dillworth was more a color than a person. Gray. He blended like a chameleon with his surroundings; the gray of his office walls, the darker gray of his gun metal desk. But unlike a chameleon, he couldn't change color. He took his gray with him wherever he went. That, I thought, was what I was letting myself in for if the pattern of my life so far was allowed to run its course. An old man humped over a desk, wrestling with figures and quotas that, no matter how you juggled them, added up to boredom. Tedium. An old man in a dry land of facts and figures and paper. Me.
The question was, was the pattern going to run its course? If not, then it wasn't me, sitting behind that plate glass and looking gray. But the pattern had already changed. The whole pattern of my life, I mean. One tiny thread had been altered, Sunday afternoon in my bedroom, and somewhere that thread connected with another thread, and so on, right up to a tenth floor office. The whole fabric was unravelling. I could feel it unravelling as I read the applicant's questionnaire form for the twentieth time that morning. There was a name on the top of the form: Gerald H. Krech. I was supposed to know that name, memorize everything given on that sheet about that name, and then I was supposed to pick up the phone and call Gerald H. Krech.
I read the meaningless sheet through once more, concentrating this time. And then I reached for the phone. I could see the sweat on the back of my hand as I picked the receiver off the rest. I began to dial, checking each number on the sheet in front of me.
And then I put the phone back.
It wasn't me.
I got up then. I needed a drink badly. My throat felt sore and the jacket of my summer-weight cord suit was sweated through the armpits. I would have taken it off, but Dillworth's scowl of disapproval wasn't worth it. The hell. I took it off anyway and got up and made my way to the water cooler.
Emily looked up from her receptionist's desk near the cooler, giving me a blond grin, the one she saved for me. Her lips were a smear of rose colored lipstick, the wrong color for her, and her perfume hung in the humid air like a sickness.
"Hi. Pretty early to be goofing off, isn't it, Mr. Ramsen?" She winked, and then the grin faded as she took a second look at me.
"Say, you don't look so hot!"
"That's an unfortunate choice of words, Emily." I plucked a cup from the dispenser and gurgled a drink into it.
"Well, lover boy," she said, lowering her voice, "you can't live it up all weekend and expect to feel like a daisy on Monday morning."
The liquid oozed down my throat like mineral oil. Like the air conditioning, it was original equipment which had forgotten its original purpose and which Dillworth wouldn't replace as long as it made believe it was working. He still read Poor Richard's Almanac.
"Stow it," I said, checking Emily's cleavage as a matter of habit. It was still there. So was the Grand Canyon.
"Okay, honey," she chuckled, "But if your wife can't take care of you better than that...."
"When she can't, I'll let you know."
"Promise?"
"Yeah. And if you believe an insurance man's promise, you're ready to play the shell game."
"Boy, you are in a state this morning, aren't you."
"It should be California."
"Say the word and I'll pack my bag." She meant it too. She swiveled in her seat far enough so I could see that her skirt was at half mast on her thighs. She let a neatly manicured fingernail trail up her knee.
"Close those Gates of Hell, Emily. I'm not for seducing this morning."
"There's always this evening, Bill." And then her face turned serious. "It's been a long time...."
I shrugged. "You've got a lot of talent Emily." I let my hand slip inside her low-cut blouse. Where we were, no one could see us from the office. Unless they happened to walk out to the water cooler. "A couple of bagsful. Isn't anyone taking you up on it lately?"
She frowned. "You think I'd go for just anyone?"
"No. There's the lame, the halt, and the blind."
Her full lips turned to a pout. "That's not fair. I've never been to bed with a blind man."
"Don't ever. He'd go nuts, trying to see what his hands were telling him about."
She smiled at that one. It was a silly game I was playing, but I couldn't face Gerald H. Krech and his sordid life history again. Her voice came on low this time, very low. I had to strain to hear.
"Listen, I'd give a month's pay to have you bend me over this desk right now and...."
"Emily!" I placed my hand over her mouth in feigned shock. I was really surprised. She hadn't ever gone this far in our friendly banter. Not even after that night, a long time ago.
She bit my hand and I jerked it away from her face.
"Hey! That's no way to treat a guy! What's got into you?"
"It's not what's got into me. It's what hasn't."
I was perplexed by now. What had started as essentially a needed distraction was taking on a serious turn. I was almost feeling sorry for Emily. Almost. If she'd been ten years younger I would have taken her up on it.
If she'd been ten years younger, she would have been thirteen.
That thought stopped me a minute. I looked at her, at her blond curls and pretty features, and I saw a different Emily. Maybe it was Dillworth's unconditioned air conditioning. Maybe it was the bourbon I had drank myself to sleep with the night before. Whatever it was, the buxom blond in front of me, the woman I had spent a night with, whose body I had explored thoroughly with alcohol synthesized ardor one night on Riverside Drive became a little girl again. My fevered imagination melted away the years and the pounds, drew in the ample bosom, narrowed the hips and tightened the features and it was no longer the Emily I knew. It was someone else, someone very like Emily, except for the age.
Someone like June.
She must have seen the new interest in my eyes. Her hand reached out and clutched my knee impulsively. Her eyes stared up at me, imploringly.
"Bill...." she began.
No. It was an illusion, all an illusion. But I couldn't rid my mind of it that easily. I wanted to back away, out of her grasp, but I couldn't right then. The power of the illusion was too strong.
"Bill, could you ... would you ... tonight?"
My voice sounded strangled and T needed a drink worse than ever, and not Dillworth's economy bilge either.
"Maybe," I said. "Well see."
Her eyes lit up wide and then lowered and she turned back to her work. I went back to my desk, to Gerald H. Krech, hoping the phone wouldn't ring, hoping Dillworth wouldn't call me in that day, wishing IBM had built faster clocks.
Wishing Emily were ten years younger.
By the time I was ready for lunch break, I felt like a sponge left in a Turkish Bath. I carefully avoided Emily on my way out, waiting until she was occupied and sneaking past before she had time to look up for the expected invitation to lunch. Mine was going to be liquid and it was going to be long. Maybe all afternoon if I felt like it. Maybe all year, and maybe longer. Dillworth and his gray sagging wattles could go to hell.
An air conditioned bar is not hard to find in mid Manhattan, and I found one post haste. The name of the bar was Grimm's, a lovely name for a bar if there ever was one. I half expected it to be filled with fairy tail. But it was well enough away from the office building so that I wouldn't run into any of the other agents or office help.
The place was quiet, which I liked. It was also dark, which I liked better. It was a real bar, not the luncheon kind, so there wasn't the usual midday office crowd lining the rail and eating roast beef sandwiches in booths. I had a bottle of beer, just for a starter, because it was cold and would wash away the brackish taste of Dillworth's uncooled water. It did. The bottle was beady with sweat and ice in my hand and I tilted it to my lips, ignoring the glass the curly headed young guy behind the bar set in front of me. I didn't put it down till it was half empty. Then I filled the glass and ordered a shot to go with it.
I had guessed right about the place. I should have known from the name, from the way the place was barely lit, from the too toothy smile of the curly headed lad waiting on me. I knew when I began to look around and noticed two couples in booths near the rear. The bartender was taking them a tray of Pink Ladies and they were giggling and smacking their lips and having a whale of a time with each other.
They were all fellas.
Gay boys they, with lisping lips drinking frothy drinks and all merrily unaware that women had been invented. I wondered how you got like that. Then I remembered how I was and it didn't seem so strange. They went for boy and I went for girl-literally. I saluted my comrades in deviancy silently, careful to be unobtrusive lest they mistake me for one of their merry crew. Though I was not of their ilk, a textbook on Deviant Behavior would find us both under its covers, unhappy thought. I tried to drown the thought in another shot, double this time. Suspended above my head was one of those beer advertisements that are really clocks that are made to look like Gulliver's pocket watch, with the face on one side and "Buy Bud" or something like that on the other, all revolving around mechanically like a two dimensional world. I like those kind of clocks. The great thing about them is that every time it occurs to you to wonder what time it is and you look at them, the side with the beer advertisement is always facing you. You can wait till the clock face swings around again, but that's cheating. The thing is to order a drink and then forget about it for the time being and not look again until that drink's finished. Inevitably, you spend a lot more time in the place than you had planned. Inevitably, you get plastered.
I spied a bottle of Old Jack Daniels amid the forest of labels shelved behind the bar. Immediately my heart went out to it and immediately I began ordering from that particular bottle, until at last the bar boy saved himself wasted motion by setting the whole bottle on the bar in front of me. Cute kid, he was, and thoughtful as hell, too. I took my Old Jack Daniels neat, with an occasional glass of water for ballast.
I was getting quite stoned.
The clock that was a beer advertisement went round and round, like a flattened celestial sphere, and my head began a sub orbital motion along with it. The queeros in the back booths began to play the juke box; gay songs about gay things like lollipops and bubble gum and other oral delights.
I began singing something too, something like "Old Jack Daniels had a still, Eee-yi, Eee-yi-OOO!" and the bar boy was doing his best to give me dirty looks, coming through with something like a mincing frown, when her hand touched my shoulder.
Emily's.
I knew it was hers because it was attached to the rest of her body, and I knew that was hers because-well, because I knew.
I spun around on my stool and almost went sailing off it. I had been sitting there for many turns of the Budweiser clock, and watching it through a shot glass had fairly upset my equilibrium.
"Ho, there Emily!" I greeted, "How're they hanging these days?"
If she blushed I couldn't tell. It was too dark in there.
"Shh!" she said, "You're drunk."
"True enough," I agreed, "Funny I never thought of it. Say, I always wanted to ask you something-how do you ever see the keys of your typewriter."
"How long have you been here?" she asked, putting it all on the stool next to me. The bar boy frowned disapproval. He didn't like this kind of thing going on in his place.
"Don't know. Ask Gerald."
"George? Who's Gerald?"
"Ah, come on," I said, slapping her rotund rump, "You know Gerry Krech. He's a fat old jerk with a million dollars who wants another insurance policy so his wife can spend an extra year in Miami when he knocks off."
"Jesus, how did you get so drunk? I looked all over for you. This is the fifth place I've been in. Dill-worth's busting a gut about the Trent endowment case and wants to see you."
I told her what Dillworth could do. I told her he and Trent could do it together if they wanted to, right in the back of the bar. I'd go call them both up so they could come down and we could watch.
"Never mind that. I'm going to get you in a cab and get you home."
"Home?"
"On Riverside Drive."
CHAPTER SIX
There was no arguing with her. I Was pretty far gone by then and I knew it, but I resented her telling me so. But I didn't care that much what happened to me, so she poured me into a cab and I sloshed around there next to her while we drove to her apartment on Riverside.
A lot of things didn't occur to me then. Things like what my wife was going to think when I didn't show up for supper, things like what Dillworth was thinking that very minute as the cab made it way across town. Funny little things.
"You got anything to drink in your place?" is a question that did occur to me before I got out of the cab.
"Don't worry," Emily assured me, "I've got everything you're ever going to need, baby."
"Yeah? Got a daughter?"
"What?"
"Never mind. Skip it. What's this thing you have here?"
"Ohl Wait until we get in the apartment at least, will you?"
"What's wrong with the cab? Perfectly good cab."
But she stopped my roaming hand inside her blouse and I sagged inert, catching my second wind, the rest of the trip. Her breasts made nice, peaceful pillows, rising and falling and lulling me to sleep.
We got out of the cab on Riverside Drive somewhere in the nineties. It was a big hulking mass of a building, a modern throwback to the medieval era, with towers and turrets and scaling grime instead of ivy up the walls. Once fashionable, now split up into cubbyhole apartments by a succession of rent speculating corporations, it was a besmirched citadel of the working class girl, like Emily-the type who was willing to pay more than they were worth in order to maintain the illusion of respectability provided by the location. Girls like Emily, or younger and not as knowing as Emily who still clutched New York dreams to their pretty bosoms and hadn't yet taken on more than one lover. And girls in between the Emily stage and the starry-eyed New Yorker magazine stage, who had taken on more than one lover and were hoping the one with the money would come along if they kept playing the field and get them out Of there, set them up in something better or even marry them, if they were jerk enough. A citadel of dreams. Eventually, they all ended up as modern day courtesans, like Emily.
Emily got me into the creaking self-service elevator and we creaked our way up to her seventh floor apartment. It had a kitchenette, a bedroom, and a living room. Emily was a loner. She had graduated from the class of share-apartment stenos who artsy-fartsied their walls with travel posters and cheap reproductions of Goya from Macy's. Her place looked comfortable, un-self-conscious and no longer like a pad stocked with Museum of Modern Art miniatures and candle-splattered Chianti bottles you would find in a dozen or more pads in the same building.
I felt a little sorry for Emily the second time that day. She was okay. She probably deserved something better. Something better than me, anyway. Something better than a married guy hot after kids young enough to be his daughters. But she didn't know about this. She had gone through her share of illusions and now she was ready to settle for a good night's session in the rack with a guy who could give her a good loving up and then walk out the door the next day with a grin and no broken strings trailing after him.
"Got anything to drink?" I said as soon as the door was closed after us. I was in a bad stage where the alcohol edge was just starting to fade and I was going to feel lousy as hell if I didn't get the high back up to where it had been when I left Grimm's fairyland.
"There's a bottle of Scotch in the kitchen pantry. Help yourself."
"Fine," I said, and found the bottle and poured myself a tumblerful, taking it to the living room and sitting down on the sofa bed with it. This time I sipped. I didn't want to get stoned again, just keep up the edge.
Emily was having remorse over rocks. "I'm a bitch," she proclaimed, perching on a chintz covered ottoman and looking up at me with soulful blond's eyes. "I shouldn't have brought you here."
"But you're glad you did," I concluded for her.
"Yes. I'm glad. You were drunk, a noisy drunk at that cruddy old bar, and now you're tapering off to a nice quiet drunk, and I'm glad I found you when I did, or I might not have been able to do it-bring you here. I told them at the office I was sick and was going home. Because I knew I'd find you in some bar if I looked hard enough. I could tell by the way you looked at the water cooler this morning. What's eating you, Bill?"
"Cancer."
"That what you're going to tell Dillworth?"
"The hell with Dillworth. I don't punch a clock anymore."
"No, you don't. You're almost your own boss, aren't you, now? But that doesn't include taking off in the middle of the day with a stack of work on your desk and not telling anybody. Not as long as Dillworth's still the manager."
"Dilly's old fashioned, sweetheart. When I run things, the first thing I'm going to do is do away with all regulations. The second thing I'm going to do is put a nice big bed in the middle of the office so everyone can have orgies on their coffee breaks."
"And the third thing you're going to do is be replaced."
"I like you better when you're not talking serious."
She grinned at that. "I'm sorry, Bill. That's not what I brought you here for, was it? I'm going to go take a shower now. Wash off all the serious and hide little dabs of perfume all over me for you to find." She got up from the ottoman like a tawny cat rising from a rock. "You just stay here and nurse that drink and I'll be out in two shakes." She gave me a lingering look, and then she added. "There's a phone here. If you want to call your wife, I mean."
"Thanks. Will do."
I watched her rump undulate from the room and then I thought about calling my wife. It would have been easier just to leave. Lying, of sorts, is a thing you do if you're a salesman, without thinking about it. It's just an occupational tool, like a nice smile. I could lie, little or big, to almost anyone in the world and not feel a thing afterward. I never had the desire to wave Diogenes' lantern in front of people anyway. There's damn few people you meet who wouldn't rather be lied to, which is one of the first lessons in lifesmanship. It's what makes the world turn and sells insurance policies. But I hated like hell to lie to Jeanette, for the simple reason it was too damn easy. Her nature was so trusting I could have gotten away with murder any number of times during our marriage.
I downed half the tumbler of Scotch and picked up the phone on the end table.
Her voice was cool, like a serene, gentle breeze. "Hello?"
"Bill, honey."
"Oh, hi! I just put Wendy to bed for her nap."
"Look, baby, I don't think I'm going to make it for supper tonight. I've got to go to Jersey to see a big client. Estate job. If I can sell him, it'll mean a nice commission. Okay?"
Her voice sounded disappointed, "But darling; I ... oh, well, all right. If you have to. I may go out then, to see Grace. What time do you think you'll be home?"
"I don't know. Probably late."
"Well, don't forget to have supper then."
"I won't. Goodbye, hon."
"'Bye, darling."
I hung up and stared at my Scotch, feeling rotten inside, even through the nice buzz I was starting to get. I could rationalize, in a weird way. I was trying to escape. Not from my wife, but from myself, from an obsession that wouldn't give me any peace. I was trying to fight one vice with another, like fighting fire with fire. What I had done with Sami was rape in the eyes of the law. What I was going to do with Emily was adultery. Emily, I figured, was the lesser of two evils.
I was using Emily to fight Sami.
Emily didn't take long in the bathroom. I had just finished the tumbler of Scotch and was about to pour another when she walked into the room. She paused at the doorway, posing there with hand on hip, waiting for me to pass judgment on her impromptu preparations.
My eyes travelled over her quickly. There was no need for her to worry. Nature had done well by Emily, and her own small improvements were advantageous, A touch of lipstick, pale rose. Hair groomed in lovely long blond locks that fell down around her shoulders in baroque swirls, as if alive. Eyeshade pointing up the natural greenness of her eyes.
The rest had had nothing added to it except a long green silk robe. It was a nice touch. There was no need for the robe, but Emily had put it on for effect, and the effect was stunning. It was of a shiny green clinging material, the color of spring leaves under lamplight. Tied loosely with a tasseled cord, the wings of the lapel lay back, forming a frame for her cleavage that left deep desirable shadows between her breasts. The white of one forward thrust leg peeked out invitingly in long curved lines down to the rose colored toenails. Why women paint their toenails is beyond me, but I wasn't worrying about such hypothetical questions then.
"Hello again," I said.
Her lips parted slightly in a soft smile which permitted just the tip of her pink tongue to answer my greeting, more meaningfully than words.
When she walked toward me I saw a lot more leg. The robe wasn't designed to cover much. It didn't.
"Hello, man," she whispered when she had crossed to the couch where I sat. "What would you like?"
I flicked the robe open. "That," I said.
She let her hips roll forward more, not moving her feet.
"It's yours. Anytime."
My hand reached out and touched her. My other hand still held the tumbler. It was all very casual. I felt a slow pleasant warmth come over me, less from the Scotch than from what I was doing.
"I like that, Bill. You touch me like you own me. I like that."
She had very nice legs. I untied the cord and let the robe fall open all the way. Emily's legs were much better than I remembered them from that one, wild night. Sitting directly in front of them like that on the sofa made me appreciate them much more. But a visual appreciation was not enough. I set the glass of Scotch on the end table and began appreciating them with both hands. I ran my hands all over them, down the sides of them to her narrow ankles and then up the insides, feeling her full firm calves and then the incredible white softness of her thighs. Every time my hand would touch her, I could feel her shudder, a little electric spasm that started where I touched and traveled up through her to escape in a tense sucking in of breath. A glow seemed to come from her body. It was as if she was trembling beneath her skin. I kept that up in slow, even caresses, and after a while it became a game. A funny little game, exciting for me and suspensful as hell for Emily. Because I never went above her legs.
You would have to see Emily to appreciate just what kind of a game it was I was playing. Where the robe fell open above were two trembling delights any other man would have paid attention to immediately. Large, creamy skinned globes, shaped like great tears and tipped with little pink distended buttons of nipples. They were the breasts of a woman in her prime, full, and without sag that would come in a few years. They were soft and resilient looking and out-thrust to cast warm shadows over her upper anatomy.
She was waiting for me to touch them.
She was dying for me to touch them.
But after a while she sensed the game I was playing, and the muscles of her legs grew hard with desire under my hands as I worked up an unbearable suspense in her body. She stood that way, muscles tense, until she couldn't stand it any longer.
"Bill," she gasped, "Please, touch me up here, up here!"
And she cupped her breasts to show me where, to show me how I had made the nipples large and hard without even touching them. Her legs shook visibly now, and I knew that further delay would be torture for her.
But I was enjoying it too much.
A perverse delight came over me as I saw the desire-strained expression that had come over her face.
"Turn around," I said.
"Bill-"
"Turn around, Emily!"
When she had, my hands went up under the trailing robe.
I began playing the same game; this time from the rear.
Emily's buttocks were large and round and smooth, and I forgot about her breasts as I touched them. By now, I was getting excited as hell too, and as I felt the excitement rise in me, I ripped the robe from her shoulders. It fell to the floor in a green heap and Emily's white body was half bent before me. I kept up the play with one hand while the other began unfastening things. Belt buckles, shirt buttons.
Things.
"Bill, when are you going to-"
"Now."
I shed clothes like a tree shedding unwanted leaves. There was nothing but her buttocks filling the room, then, larger than life, and I rose to meet them.
"Bill, Bi-illl!"
And it was like that, crashing against the wall of her, again and again till the tide rose up and swept through us both in a lashing, searing fury.
It was too quick. Too soon the decrescendo came on us, a false euphoria of the senses.
Afterward, she seemed embarrassed.
"Bill, did you like me-like that?"
"You were fine Emily. That's a perfectly fine way."
"I know, but-"
She sagged against me, shuddering, her face still red.
"What is it, doll?"
"It was so quick, and it was like-like you didn't even care who or what I was."
Christ, I thought, now she's going to make a thing of it. They're all the same. A quick session isn't good enough for them-they want you to tell them they're the best woman in the world, that you'd never had it better. It had been good, but not as good as another certain little person had been. It had been fine, but Jeanette would have been the same. Anger and guilt and failure formed on acid triumvirate in my glands. Anger because it had failed, the whole goddamned experiment, guilt because I'd tried it in the first place, and the dull sense of failure because I knew the best woman in the world wouldn't have been good enough for me then.
"Bill, you didn't even touch my breasts."
"Sit down here, Emily, and I will." It hadn't been fair to her. We sat on the sofa, and I took her in my arms and caressed her breasts. I kissed them and nestled into them and I could feel her desire stirring again.
And mine.
Because she was a woman, made of female flesh; because she was next to me and I could taste and smell and feel her and for no reason else. I eased her down on the sofa and saw the tips of her breasts tremble with anticipation.
They were lovely and they deserved better than I had done for them.
"Emily," I said, "I'm going to get on."
Her answer was a smile.
Her smile became a look of surprise as she saw what I meant. I encompassed her chest.
I took care of those damn breasts for her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I left Riverside Drive with a dead feeling inside. "Better to sew your seed in the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground," the Bible says.
Well, I hadn't spilled any on the ground. In another place maybe, but not on the ground. Nothing would grow where I had sewn mine. Not even weeds. But I felt like a tree must feel in autumn, when the sap thickens and stops. Lifeless.
It wasn't because of Emily. I had carried her to bed and received the thanks of her kiss and the gratitude of her eyes and left her there. She had wanted me to stay the night, but she hadn't made a fuss about it. For that, I appreciated her. But there was nothing more for me at Emily's.
I was too sober now. I could taste all the cigarettes I smoked and my mouth felt like cotton wadding. I had a slight headache and my eyes were watery. And I had that gnawing ache inside my gut you get when the pangs of hunger descend on you too quickly. It was almost seven o'clock and I had neglected to ask Emily for anything. Now my stomach was sending wild alarms to my brain, reminding me that a diet of Scotch is one hell of a stimulant to appetite, once it starts wearing off. It was a hell of a feeling. The rest of me was as dead and stale as a crushed butt, but my stomach was yowling for a grease job. There was nothing for it but to eat, as the poet said.
First I had to get a cab. I walked over a couple of blocks to Broadway. There was a cab stand there and a restaurant. I had a choice. I chose the restaurant. First things first, my third grade teacher always told me, and at that moment of crisis her lifelong lesson rescued me from the pangs of indecision.
The restaurant rescued me from my pangs of hunger. It was not much; a veritable hole in the wall with a counter behind on which could be seen the usual stainless steel paraphernalia, huffing and wheezing and spouting off steam. The waitress was a middle aged Man O War who should have been put in dry-dock years ago. Nevertheless, she gave me a lewd wink over my plate of hash and eggs, flattering my ego and dulling my appetite. She had a head like an unkempt Medusa and a face like Bela Lugosi's grandmother. I kept my eyes on my plate and wolfed its contents down, not pausing long enough to pollute my palate with the unsavory mess. A drunk was arguing loudly about whether or not the Third World War had happened yet. An off-duty nurse hid behind a Daily News, showing an interesting figure with breasts ballooning from the white nylon bodice. An old geek in the corner was spilling soup down his chin. The short order cook was goosing the waitress every time she went by, leaving a wet mark on her uniform where his hand had been. Outside, a bunch of teen-agers were smoking what could have been reefers but probably weren't because it wasn't the right section of town. A girl in the group had on a pair of shorts and I looked at her legs, and that was it, I was turned on more than any of them were and I had to get out of there.
I shoved a bill toward the cash register and lammed it. Outside, the girl with the shorts didn't even look as I walked by, didn't even know I would have given her everything in my wallet, which was about seventy-six dollars, if she'd let me take her in an alley and have about three sweet tight minutes of it. She never looked up, but I felt a throb as I walked by just the same, because I was thinking how it would have been.
I was thinking it would have felt good, even after Emily.
There was a cab waiting at the corner and I hopped into the back seat and told the driver to take me down to the Village, to a certain bar I knew of there.
If Emily hadn't killed it, I'd find something that would. I'd find something that would take away ah those little girls in shorts from my mind. All of them.
I didn't know what it was. Something, anything to get me out of the mental squirrel cage I was in. A diversion, a distraction, an experience. Kicks. A jolt. If I couldn't find it in the Village, it wouldn't be anywhere. Maybe I should have told the driver to take me to a good head shrinker, but I was past that point now.
I was at the point of no return.
The cab took me down Broadway to Times Square, which was lit up like a Christmas tree high on pot, which is a hell of an image, even for a book like this. Negro whores were already buzzing down side streets on speculation, boy kids with pin curls and rosy faces lolled around hot dog stands sipping Avocado juice and checking everything not in skirts. Tourists gawked at all the pretty moving signs, throwing their necks out of joint. Arcades dinged and clanged and panhandlers bugged people for nickels and dimes and taxis revved at lights and buses snort-ed away from curbs and Puerto Rican pimps collared yokels from out of town into going up to a cheap hotel and paying for a whore they would never see because the pimp would walk down the back stairs after he hooked the mark for a ten spot. It was a hell of a mess. It was a sewer with a neon grating, a good place to lose your roll and a better place to lose your mind and a hell of a way to die. It was Times Square.
We got out of there. We sneaked through shifting gaps in traffic like a wine merchant plugging bung-holes down Seventh Avenue, making lights like the street was a pinball machine and we were winning and when we finally got to Sheridan Square I gave him a fiver and told him to keep the change, which he did, thanking me and wishing me a merry evening in the Village.
Every time I think of Sheridan Square I think of the blue lights of the IRT, maybe because it's one of the few stops where the lights always seem to work. I also think of girls in Toreador pants and ponytails and eye makeup on like Bela Lugosi's. Boy kids in tight clam diggers and striped jerseys I think of too. Also I think of Tony's Bar.
Tony is a wop I used to pal around with in the army and then a while after until I got respectable and married and started working for Westfoco conning people into thinking life insurance might make them live a little longer because they wouldn't have to worry about how everyone was going to feel when they were dead because everyone would be rich if they bought enough of it and then they'd feel pretty damn good and wouldn't worry about the poor sucker who bought it and kicked off. Tony and I had some pretty good times in the army and afterward we still got together and talked about some of the strange tail we had snagged and jokingly tell each other we had little bastards all over the world. When Tony first opened up his place I was his first customer and he still has the dollar bill I gave him over the bar, which is pretty corny, but he always says I'll never be broke because that dollar's always there if I need it. Not very bright, Tony, but a good guy just the same who can put you on to any thing the Village has to offer, if he knows you, and right now I was ready to take him up on it.
I hadn't been to the Village in some time so I had to refresh myself on the streets but once I was in the vicinity I had no trouble finding Tony's. It was in an area that is sort of the blurred dividing line between the Old Village, with stoop sitting beer drinking guineas like Tony, and the New, with smartly dressed women who are lesbians and smartly dressed girls who are pretending to be lesbians, and upper middle class stock brokers who are pretending to be upper class intellectuals.
Tony was in. He was at the bar, which wasn't too crowded yet. and when T walked in he walked half way round with a big white toothed grin on his face, looking as if he were going to offer me the whole joint if I said the word. I said "Hi!"
He had a handshake like a boa constrictor's, if a boa constrictor had hands. "Son of a goddamned gun, the Insurance Man! Hey, sell me a policy, huh Bill? I only got twenty thousand worth now."
"You're a bad risk," I said, waiting for him to release my hand so I could get the circulation back, "Somebody's liable to knock you off anytime. Some dame's husband."
That made him laugh, and it was good to see Tony laugh. He laughed with his whole face, starting with the mouth and spreading in deep furrows all over his sharp, crudely handsome face, till it looked like even his curly black hair was laughing.
"Hey, maybe it's you baby. Maybe you ought to check on Jeanette more often, huh?"
It was a standard joke with him. He'd had eyes for Jeanette ever since we'd first been going together. Anyone else, it wouldn't have been funny.
"What you drinking, huh? Abasanti? Absinthe? Tony's special? You name it, we got it. On the house."
I parked on a wooden stool and told him I'd have a whiskey Collins for a starter.
"How's business," I asked.
"Lousy," he grinned. "You know you can't make money trying to run a straight place down here."
"Since when did you start running a straight place?"
"Hey, man, you kidding? I got to pay protection to keep the queers away. Next thing they'll have me selling espresso or take away my license. Business is not so hot, baby." Then he grinned. "The bar business, that is."
I looked around. There were three or four couples in booths and the bar customers were all quietly concerned with their drinks. I motioned Tony closer so I wouldn't disturb them.
"Got an ounce?"
Tony looked down on my drinks. "Yeah, baby, you know. Only I didn't think you were hipped on the stuff."
I shrugged. "Once in a while, why not?"
"I'm hip. It's not like I was selling you junk. Pot's okay, only I was just wondering, that's all. I'll get you an ounce. Just tell me when you're ready to leave."
I had another whiskey Collins and we started to talk over old times. Tony had fought some in the army and even now he looked like he didn't have an extra ounce of fat on him. His biceps bulged beneath his short-sleeved white sport shirt like thick veined animals. There was a picture up over the bar of him in ring togs, and you wouldn't think he could look so mean to see him standing behind the bar grinning drinks your way faster than you could drink them. Tony's generosity was as vast as his anger was quick.
He looked disturbed when I told him I was on the town.
"Hey, it's none of my business, but is there anything between you two?"
He was offering me the chance. Tony was not brilliant but he was sensitive, and he sensed that all was not right with his old army buddy, that something was bugging him. Something was bugging him indeed, but the confidence on the tip of my tongue clung to my palate, glued there by the last minute red warning signal from the brain that Tony would not appreciate. Even to a friend as close and as old as Tony, I could not divulge my problem. For Tony had a twelve-year-old girl of his own.
Tony would not appreciate.
"Nothing," I said, "Can't a man have a night to himself once in a monogamous lifetime?"
"Sure." he grinned, and then frowned again. "But why the pot."
I lifted my Collins. "Skip the pot. It was just an idea. I am enjoying presently the illusion that I am a Village character."
"Oh." A puzzled Oh. A scratch of the head, and a look of concern. "How long have you been on the sauce?"
Tony didn't mean Worchestershire. "I've been tippling since the tap of noon, old amigo; enjoying life in a highly Rabelasian manner, so to speak."
"Uh uh. I thought so. You always start to talk like that when you've been on a high. How come you didn't become a poet instead of an insurance man?"
"I am a poet. You are a poet. We are all poets. We are all secretly poets, Antonio, and today I am giving the poet his due. Another Collins, and this time let me buy you one."
"Nah, never drink on duty. Bad habit. Also, the register's busted, so I can't take your money."
I sighed defeat and let him concoct another wickedly Italianate version of a whisky Collins. Pure booze, when Tony was done with it. I quaffed.
"There might be other things than pot," I suggested.
"Hey, you don't mean hard stuff! That I won't believe. First because you wouldn't use the junk and second because you know I wouldn't handle it. I run a respectable place. Pot is respectable."
"Thank you for your faith," I said, doubting whether it was well placed at this stage of things, "But I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of-other diversions."
This was something he could understand. No man is monogamous, and Tony, married as he was, was more of a man than most.
"You have a lech?"
"A very special kind of lech," I nodded.
"It must be. With your looks you shouldn't have any trouble picking up something nice and clean. There's a hundred broads in Village bars right now waiting for someone to come along and wail them silly."
I looked up and down the bar. Number one of the one-hundred was sitting near one end, studying a gin fizz. Her eyes met mine a brief second, challenged, and then returned to the fizz. She was a redhead in a tight dress stretched over a very good frame, from what I could see from my perch. She looked maybe twenty-four or twenty-five.
Tony had gone to serve other customers. I toyed with my drink and some ideas about Red until he came back.
I indicated Red to him with the very slightest motion of my head. "Something like that would be very nice," I said. "If she were about ten years younger."
Tony whistled. It was hard to shock Tony, but I had, a little.
"I never would have believed it." Then he shrugged, a to-each-his-own-vice shrug old in its Meditteranean wiseness. "I'll give you a number and an address. Lose it when you don't need it any more."
He scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to me and I took it, saying no more. We talked about life insurance and the whores in Tiajuana and had more drinks and then I left.
The place was not even in the Village and I had to take another cab to get there, it was, surprisingly, a Central Park West address up in the one hundreds. Not so surprising when I got there, however. The Central Park West location was deceptive as hell. 100th Street seemed to be the dividing line between festering decay of the worst kind imaginable and fashionable Park front apartment dwellings. The decay had left a few good buildings marooned in its midst, but the rest were dirt encrusted twenty story hovels that had been through a succession of owners until they had become the final nesting place for immigrants from the sunny isle of Puerto Rico. Kids in the streets were as thick as roaches in the hallways. Torn copies of the News and Mirror and Spanish language papers were heaped in gutters like dirty snow.
There was a lot of action right out on the sidewalk. Skinny dark-skinned girls in almost dresses lingered in doorways with hands on hips or strutted boldly down the sidewalk with motions that were as obvious as two dollar signs on their rears. At the corners, there was traffic to and from the park; dark skinned mullato street gang members, Negro girls too young to be selling it openly following them, all leaving a trail of empty beer cans. It was a hell of a good place to get mugged, if you were looking for that. I had some second thoughts about Tony's friendly assistance as I left the cab at the corner and walked up the block toward the address on the paper. I almost wished I'd taken him up on the redhead. She looked pretty good, now. But I loosened my tie and tried to look as generally dishevelled as I could, which still wasn't enough to blend with the surroundings, and plunged forward.
The building was in the middle of the block. It was apparently one of the marooned ones, a sullied fortress against the filth on either side, its battlements touched with the taint. It was the only building on the block with a canopy bridging the sidewalk from the entrance. Under the canopy stood, incongruously, in full panoply, a doorman.
He was an old Negro with wise eyes that spent a good three minutes of silence scrutinizing the slip of paper I handed him. Then he said, "Yessuh, it's the penthouse you'll be wanting," and dug into his pants pocket for a key, which he handed me. I laid a five on him and went in.
The lobby was dim. When I got the self-service elevator down from wherever it was, I saw the reason for the key. After P for Penthouse there was a key slot, which meant it wouldn't do you any good to press the button next to it without having the key. A real cute trick. Handy as hell when raid time came around, I supposed. I turned the key in the slot and pressed the button and the doors slid shut. It was stuffy in that cubicle going up and I began to feel woozy from the alcohol I had been consuming all day. But I also felt a flicker that told me the alcohol wasn't going to be any problem if I found what I had come there after.
No problem at all.
The elevator stopped at P, the doors slid back again, and I got off. I found myself in a foyer with a door staring me in the face. I turned the handle. It was locked. Then I saw the buzzer under the peep hole and pushed it. In about ten seconds an eye filled the peep hole and then the door opened. I went in.
The woman who received me was a dark-skinned, loudly painted middle-aged Puerto Rican who smelled of equal portions of perfume and sweat. Her hostess smile revealed uneven yellow-stained teeth and you didn't have to get any nearer to tell she would have bad breath.
"Welcome," she grinned, "You are here the first time, yes?"
I said I was and that the place had been highly recommended by a friend. Which got me another yellow-toothed grin and "Ah, you will not be disappointed, senor."
She could have cut the "senor" jazz as far as I was concerned, but I let it pass. I took the drink offered to me, looked around the room, made a brief note of its nondescriptness-and old sofa, a leather chair, some low benches and a recently built formica topped bar at one end and a picture of an Eighteenth Century French Lady on the wall. I figured then it was time to get down to business.
"The Madame," I said, "has a very nice place. But perhaps it is even more enjoyable in there?" I pointed with my drink to a curtained doorway.
Snag tooth grinned at me again, overplaying her part. "We have what you are looking for, if you will please to tell us what it is you are looking for."
I told her.
"Yesss," she nodded, "But that will cost extra. The risk is greater with such children," she added, by way of explaining the exorbitant price she was about to charge me. I didn't care. I was willing to settle for anything just to get past those curtains and in bed with the girl who was fast taking shape in my mind. I gave her the price she asked and she told me I could go in, first door to the right, but didn't I want to look at some "clever" pictures first to get in the right mood?
I said I didn't. I said I was already in the mood and she showed me all sixty of her enameless teeth then and waved me in.
It was not much of a room, just a bed and a dresser and a sink with a towel rack over it, from which hung two long white towels. They looked clean. There was also a chair, which I hung my jacket over. Then I sat on the bed and began taking my tie and shirt off when she came in.
She was young. Not more than fifteen, probably less. Her body looked slender as a reed in the loose house coat she wore, and there was not much pushing out on it at the top. Her skin was a yellowish tan and her hair was jet black and shiny. It curled inward about her ears in thick black locks and she wore a flower in it, a carnation, which was intended to create the lie of innocence. It was just that; a lie. Her face was thin and her large dark eyes, no matter how virginal they tried to appear, looked too knowing.
But still, she was young.
"Hello," I said.
Hello, she smiled. She untied her flowered robe and showed me the buds of her little breasts. Just barely jutting foothills, they were. Her skin was that same yellowish-tan all over, and the tips of her breasts were reddish-brown. Her waist was supple and narrow, and I circled my arm inside the robe and drew her to me by it, drawing her close and feeling the warmth of her young body.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Juanita."
"Do you smoke?"
She shook her head. "My mamma does not like."
I almost laughed. Whoever her mother was, she didn't want her daughter doing such evil things as smoking cigarettes. She didn't mind her spreading for men twice her age, not as long as she brought home the money, but she didn't want her smoking. Somehow, it made Juanita more appealing for me.
"Okay," I said, "You don't smoke. What do you do?"
Her eyes flashed amusement. "I do other things. Lots of other things. What do you want me to do?"
I pulled the robe from her thin shoulders and looked at her body some more. She was just a slip of a girl
"You are a whore," I said. "I want you to do what a whore does."
She shrugged, and that hard little look came to her eyes again. "That means anything," she said. And then she commenced unbuttoning my clothes for me. Her hands were very swift and skillful and in no time at all I was ready to step out of them.
When I did, she made little motions with her hand to ensure my being ready for her.
It wasn't necessary. Somehow, I wished she hadn't. I was cherishing an illusion with her and she, unconsciously, was doing her best to spoil it. She couldn't help it. She was a whore through and through and she was just doing what she had been taught to do. Taught, no doubt, by the evil looking hag out in the reception room. But just the same I felt dismay at her all too obvious efforts. In three or four years she would be no good even for a place like this. She would have to go out on the streets and fend for herself, and she would pick up a disease sooner or later and that would be it.
I motioned toward the bed and she got on it.
I was ready. I tried not to think about the sordidness of her reality as I looked at her slim, curvy body on the bed. I tried to think of her as some little girl I had picked up on the streets and talked into coming up to a hotel room with me. And I half convinced myself.
Before I got on the bed with her, I gave her one last searching look.
"How old are you," I asked, barely whispering the words.
"Twelve," she answered.
It was all I needed. I got on the bed with her then. She opened to receive me and in a moment I was there, kissing her little breasts and feeling her move under me.
But the illusion was destroyed. She was far from the days of innocence, too far. Her little body writhed and kicked and mine responded with sheer animal excitement.
She was good. She knew her trade thoroughly. She knew all the little motions that excite, the tricks that inevitably brought responding waves of passion in me.
But she was just a whore.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I got through Tuesday without calling Sami. I was afraid she would take it into her head to call the house, or even the office, despite the little lecture I had given her, containing veiled threats and hints of the awful consequences that would occur if she didn't make herself invisible as far as my home and family were concerned. I was also half hoping I would forget about her myself, about how good she had been in bed. But at the same time I was afraid of losing her, afraid she would forget about me and be caught up in her own world again so completely she wouldn't be there when I needed her most.
Potentially, she was nothing but trouble. But she didn't call, bless her depraved little heart.
Tuesday night was poker at Jim Pearson's.
Poker Tuesday was an institution too old to be interfered with. Not that I held, at that point, anything inviolate-hadn't I been cheating on my wife with regularity for the last three days?-but this last semblance of normalcy attracted me perversely. The six or seven guys who showed up for the game were all normal sorts, eight-to-fivers like myself, but unlike myself incapable of leading secret lives, for which I both despised and admired them. Their sexual peccadilloes consisted mainly of passing off color remarks about women in their offices or known neighborhood tarts who hung around the taverns on the avenue. I felt superior to them. I also envied them.
I showed up at Jim's around seven-thirty. Frank and Lou were already there, sipping beers out on the patio. I joined them.
"Here's a fourth," Frank yelled as I came out onto the screened-in backyard patio, "One more and we can start."
Jim opened a can of beer and handed it to me. "Glad you could make it, Bill. I don't think Earl and Jerry are going to make it tonight. They called and said they weren't sure, so we can't count on 'em. Sam'll be here, though, so we'll have enough."
"Good," I said absently, shifting the ice cold can from one hand to the other. I sat down at the table with the three of them, Jim Pearson, Frank Bollinger, and Lou Ringer. They were all in a good mood and we traded repartee until Sam Netti showed up. When Sam came, we began playing.
I could see it was going to be a bad night from the beginning. My cards were running lousy and I just couldn't get up the interest to try to push the betting around a little and change my luck. I couldn't get interested. My mind kept straying to other things. The first three hands were seven card stud and I folded after the first round. After that I drew a pair of deuces in a Jacks or better deuces wild game-and ended up with three threes after throwing four dollars in the pot. Finally, I got what looked like a good hand. I had aces holed in seven stud, with nothing showing but a deuce and a six. I raised the bet a quarter and no one folded. Then the third ace came and I threw in a dollar. Still everyone stayed. I could feel the excitement now. There was almost thirty dollars in the pot by the time the last card came around. It was an ace. I had four aces, and I was ready to bet the moon. There was only one board in front of me and no pair. Frank had sixes showing and I had his third up. Lou had a possible straight. Jim was sitting with three cards to a flush and a pair. Sam Netti had a King Queen Jack of hearts showing and a ten of diamonds.
I opened the last round of betting with a buck.
The limit was two. The bet went around to Sam, who raised a dollar. I raised him back two. Frank dropped. Jim raised two dollars, from left field. Sam looked at him aghast, chewed on his cigar awhile, and turned his cards over.
It was just Jim and me.
In poker, the law of the jungle is operative at all times. It's the most savage game invented by civilized man. The real essence of poker is power, the power of the cards and the power of the betting. That it is played under an air of friendly conviviality is a deception. It is the same as hitting a guy over the head with a rock. And right then I felt the sweet feel of power as I sat across from Jim with my four aces.
I raised his raise two dollars, the limit. I would have raised more.
Jim is a mild-mannered guy. He had light-sandy hair and wears glasses and his manner is at all times polite and considerate. I almost hated what I was doing to him. The sucker had only three cards to a flush showing, a four, six and eight of clubs. The four was paired with a four of hearts. The best he could have was a full house, and that was the way he was betting it. He looked at his cards cautiously, studied them, and you could have cut the silence with a butter knife. No one said a word. Jim sat there, fingering his cards and touching his money.
And then he raised me back two.
I couldn't believe it. But then, I had a junk hand showing. It had sucked him in beautifully. A hell of a lot better than I had expected it to.
I raised back. It was the last raise. He had to call or fold.
He called. I turned my cards up slowly, one by one, saving the last ace for effect. It was going to be one hell of an effect, "Four aces," I said, turning it over.
Somebody whistled. I started to reach for the pot, worth about fifty dollars by then, when Jim casually laid his cards face up over the money.
"Straight flush," was all he said.
It was like being hit over the head with a rock. The bastard had had the five, six, and nine of clubs under all the time.
I was the sucker.
"Nice hand," I said, stunned.
Jim picked up the money and I just sat there, feeling like a swimmer bitten by a ray. For the next two hands I looked at my cards dumbly, bet automatically, and threw them in when I lost. It was not even a matter of saving face. I had just completely lost interest in the game after losing one of the best pots any of us had seen in weeks with four aces I began to think in superstitious terms, imagining some dark god hovering over me, cursing my luck.
That kind of thing can drive you nuts. After the third hand I asked to be dealt out for a while. "I've got to go to the head," I told them, truthfully. But more than that I just wanted to get away from that table.
Jim gave me a somewhat shamefaced smile. I guess the guy actually felt guilty for the way he had taken me. "Have a drink while you're in there Bill," he offered, "It's in the hall cabinet."
"Thanks," I said, "I will."
I walked up the steps into the house, which was almost a duplicate of my own, into the kitchen and looked around for a glass. I found one, in the pantry, of all places. I filled it half full of water and then went looking for the liquor cabinet.
It was in the hall, just like the man said. I took out an opened fifth of I. W. Harper's good bourbon and filled the rest of the glass with it. Then I sat down by myself in the dimly lit living room and began to sip slowly, savoring the taste on my tongue, rolling the bonded booze around in my mouth, washing my palate with it, and finally swallowing the damn stuff.
It was good bourbon. It took some of the taste of the game out of my mouth and replaced it with a better taste. As far as I was concerned, they could play the rest of the night without me; I was perfectly content to nurse the rest of the fifth of I. W. Harper's good bourbon. But then the front door opened and June came in.
"Hi, Mr. Ramsen," she smiled.
I slurped some of I. W. Harper's good bourbon over my shirt and managed a "H!" back. Just barely. It was damn unnerving of her to walk in on me like that.
But now that she had, I was glad.
She was dressed in toreador slacks this time, and bright orange they were, and clinging, very clinging. Like the skin of an orange clings to an orange, and this particular orange was very pithy. Succulent, she looked, in her bright orange pants and black and gray striped pullover jersey. Two prominent points in the jersey did the rest of the job of identifying her as a girl. Bright elfin smile she had, and hair oh so blond. Blond blond blond, kissable lovable blond. My heart leaped with love at first sight, and second and third and fourth.
"Is the game over already?" she asked.
"No," I stammered, tongue temporarily in knots, "Just me. I mean I'm just sitting out a while."
"Oh. Well, I'm glad you're here, anyway. I was just over to your house and your wife told me to tell you she'd like to go to the Women's Club meeting tonight and would it be all right if I baby sat for you."
"Yeah-uh, when did she want you?"
"Around eight-thirty."
"Okay. It's almost that now. I'll drive you there."
"Drive me there? It's only half a block!"
"Oh, yes-stupid of me. I mean I'll walk you."
"Well, of course, if you want to. I mean it's kind of silly-you'll miss the game."
"Had a run of bad luck anyway. Don't feel like playing any more poker tonight."
"Okay. Wait'll I tell Mom and then I'll be right with you."
I watched her go up the stairs, salivating over each little movement her lithe body made climbing them. And then when she was out of sight, a cold, cloying fear came over me.
I knew what I was going to do.
I wasn't going to go home with June.
I was going home later. What had been a wild panic of the blood to be near her young blond form now became a coldly calculating machine in me. It was this I feared, this separate life that was taking over, despite caution, despite reason.
I was planning.
When June came back down again I was controlled. I told her I had decided to play after all, and to tell my wife I wouldn't be home till late. And all the while I talked to her my eyes feasted on her virginal body, coveting each nubile dip and curve. My blood was pounding but my brain was controlled.
"Okay, Mr. Ramsen-see you later."
And she was off.
I went back to the game, for awhile. It was not easy, sitting there, facing the man whose daughter I planned to seduce that very evening. Concentrating on my cards was impossible; I kept watching his face, certain that he could read everything in mine, that my lecherous intentions were written all over it in large, glowing letters.
I was in unbearable tension. I sat there on the edge of my seat, wanting to get up and go to June, but I had to make it look all very normal, very innocent. And all the time I could almost feel the horns sprouting from my forehead. The cards fell in disorder, stupid, impossible hands which I played and lost, not caring, knowing it would look all the better if I had lost heavily when I got up to excuse myself from the game. And an oddly humorous idea occurred to me. Jim Pearson was the big winner. He was having one of his biggest nights since the game had first originated with our group. And a good deal of his winnings, over a hundred dollars, was my money.
I was paying him for his daughter.
After a while, the other players began to notice my obvious bad luck and comment on it.
"Bill's bad night," Frank said.
"Guess he's going to buy Jim that outboard motor tonight."
"Been getting too much lately, Bill? He's a lover, not a card player!"
They all laughed at that and I had to grin too, wryly. The damn fools. If they only knew....
"You're right, fellas," I said, getting up from my lawn chair and slapping my hand down on the table. "This isn't my night. Deal me out, I'm going to a nice air conditioned movie while I still have the price left."
"Air conditioned bar, he means," Sam snorted.
"Jim ought to buy him a drink in it, then."
And Jim, dear old Jim, stood up with an apologetic look on his face and said, "Gee, sorry you had such bad luck Bill. Maybe next week things will even up for you."
The fool.
Things would even up, all right Tonight.
"Forget it," J. said, "Just don't spend it all in one place-my money I mean."
And I left amidst their laughter.
My timing was perfect. When I reached the house it was a few minutes past nine o'clock. My wife had left and the kids were both in bed. June was watching the television. She was curled up on the couch in a blur of orange. The room was dim with only the flickering light of the teevee casting playful shadows over her pert form. Her hair glowed blond in the dark. I felt something turn over in my chest as I closed the door quietly behind me.
She was surprised to see me. The blond head bobbed up from its dark nest of cushions and I felt her eyes peering through the darkness, straining to see who it was.
"Mr. Ramsen?"
"Yes, June, it's me."
"Gee, you scared me. I didn't expect you to be coming home till later. Is something wrong?"
"No-I just got a headache and decided to call it a night, is all."
"Want me to get you an aspirin?"
"Thanks, if you would."
She had baby sat for my wife before and knew where everything was. I was charmed with her solicitous concern for my well being. Actually, I did have a slight headache, but it was a minor thing. Much less important than an ache I was having elsewhere.
I was hoping she would cure that, too.
I sat myself in front of the teevee set, on the sofa still warm from the animal heat of her body. I unbuttoned my nylon sport shirt. It was warm in the living room. I had no undershirt on, but it didn't matter-after all, wasn't it my own home?
It was.
I unbuttoned it the rest of the way, letting it hang open. What the hell. It was hot. I was hot. In more ways than one.
It wasn't long before little June came trudging in with a glass of water and an aspirin.
"Take this, Mr. Ramsen-daddy always takes aspirin when he has one-a headache, I mean. Do you feel feverish?"
"Sort of," I said. "Could be a virus or something like that." She handed me the aspirin and I swallowed it with some water and set the glass on the coffee table. Little Flossie Nightingale looked at me with a becoming concern in her large brown eyes.
"Gee, maybe I better stay for a while." She settled her little orange derriere on the edge of the couch.
"I'd appreciate it, June," I nodded. "If you don't mind watching the TV here with me."
Every Caesar has his Rubicon, and I leapt mine with a quick but casual movement which captured her hand and pressed it to my forehead. "Do I feel feverish, June?" I said, before she could recover from her surprise. Her hand was like a cool frond on my forehead. She held it there of her own volition after I had released it.
"Well, sort of. Just relax and take it easy, Mr. Ramsen. I'll stay till your wife comes." Her hand went away.
"You can call me Bill," I said, "Mr. Ramsen sounds awfully stuffy for two people who are practically next door neighbors."
She looked uncertain at that and then smiled and relaxed back on the couch next to me and I could feel the warmth of her touching me, exciting. We both watched the TV awhile. To this day I can't remember what was on that night. All I saw was shapeless gray blobs and my ears registering the blabber of incoherent commercials, meaningless sounds which boomed into the dark room hollowly, for all I could really hear was the sounds of June breathing, and all I could see from the corners of my eyes were her little breasts moving, and all I knew was the torture of wanting to touch them. Television, the household idiot, blabbered on while I went through paroxysms of desire and shifted on the couch to gain the slightest treasured touch of June, to have an orange knee touching mine. It was a midsummer night's madness. I began to regret the whiskey I had drunk at Jim's house, for I was starting to sweat freely. But I knew it wasn't all the whiskey that was making me sweat.
I kept thinking about Monday night, about the place I had gone to and the twelve-year-old Puerto Rican whore I had paid to make love to, comparing her with the clean cut blond girl next to me. How I wished it would be as simple with her as it had been with Juanita! But I treasured June's merest touch more than the whole time I had spent with Juanita; enjoyed more the torture of her nearness than the physical release Juanita had given me. Several times I tried to think myself out of it, to tell myself it was all in the mind, but then her orange clad leg would shift on the couch and touch mine and the whole foundation of control was blasted to sweet, quivering little fragments.
I craved June all the more for the forbiddenness of her. To be so near something so unavailable was tantalizing beyond belief. I was torturing myself with it as each minute ticked by. Coming over, I had fully intended to have her at all costs, despite any resistance, but now I found I was no raptist. I had not crossed the Rubicon, but some minor tributary. The major fording was yet to be accomplished. I realized this, and my heart sank.
I tried conversation, stupid, febrile conversation, hoping it would lead to an opening, a chance to gather my determination and pursue my objective without being completely awkward.
"How's the vacation been?" I began.
Her eyes switched from the TV screen to me without changing expression. "Oh, okay. Kind of a drag, so far, though. I mean most of the boys are away and we aren't going anywhere this summer till late, almost when school starts again."
"You miss the boys, eh?" I smiled, not lecher-ously, I hoped.
"Well, yes. I don't go out on dates much yet but I guess I will be when school starts again."
"Uh huh. Who's the lucky one?"
If she blushed, I couldn't tell in the dim room. "Oh, no one in particular."
"Like them all, huh?"
"Sort of. But most of them are so-icky. I'll be glad when I'm in high school and can go out with older boys."
A chance, a hope. "Oh ho!" I chided, "Looking for ones with experience, huh?"
She tittered. A lovely, unselfconscious titter that told me I had said exactly what she meant.
"Well, you know-some boys are so awkward when they take you to the movies or any place."
"All thumbs and no fingers," I joked daringly.
She peered at me silently a minute, her eyes burning into mine. "I didn't mean-well, there's nothing wrong with a little petting, is there?"
"Hell no, and I don't see how a boy could take you out and not want to-well, you're a very nice looking girl, June." And my hand slid over and patted her thigh.
I waited a torturous minute for her response. For her to recoil, to move her leg away or push my hand from where it rested.
She didn't. She let it stay there.
So did I.
"Thank you," she breathed. She was staring at me intently now, suddenly aware that there might be more behind my words than just idle conversation, that I was regarding her with an interest that was something more than neighborly.
I let my other arm slip behind her on the couch. "In fact," I said, keeping a friendly, half-humorous tone to my voice, "You're one of the nicest girls in the neighborhood."
She giggled. "I bet you say that to all your baby sitters."
The reminder of my status was painful, but I brushed it aside.
"No, just the good looking ones," I joked, and my hand closed over so slightly over her thigh.
"I'll tell you a secret," she said, squatting to face me, but still ignoring the hand, "Shoot."
"You'll promise not to tell your wife I said it?"
"Cross my heart."
She giggled again, and I could see the playful interested look in her eyes now. "Okay, I'll tell you then. All the girls on the block-Joan and Arlene and the rest-they all think you're gorgeous."
"No!"
"Honest!"
Delivered at any other moment, the news might have amused me highly. As it was right then, I wanted to sing. To laugh, jump, snort and play, but mostly to lay.
She thought I was gorgeous. Gorgeous.
And she was right. Suddenly I was as gorgeous as Tab Hunter in a cashmere sweater. Or nude on a bear rug.
When little girls think you're gorgeous, there's very little to worry about. Very little indeed. My circling arm homed in around her shapely little shoulders.
"Tell me more," I said, exhilarated with the sweet wine fragrance of her youth.
She nestled in, not without nervousness. "I-I feel kind of funny, Mr. Ra-Bill...."
"Me too," I admitted, "Like I want to hold you closer." And I gathered her in till her little blond head rested sleepily on my shoulder. She was nervously amused, nervously excited, and oh, so warm.
"We shouldn't be doing this...."
"Shhh!" I said, touching her lips with my finger. "There's nothing wrong with a little petting. I like you, June."
She trembled in my arm, like a kitten. Luxuriously. I imagined I could hear her purr. I stroked her face with my other hand. Her skin was cool and smoother than the insides of sea shells. I touched the golden floss of her hair, her curved, pulsing throat, her warm lips, with my fingertips, reading her loveliness with my fingers like a blind man reading braille.
"Ohhh! Mr. Ramsen, I don't think-"
I silenced her with a kiss.
She recoiled at first, but my arm was firm around her back, and soon she began to return the pressure, gently, questioningly.
And then her lips parted like the yielding petals of a flower. My tongue tasted hers and grew drunk. The breath choked in my throat and I could feel her little breasts hard and trembling against mine.
She drew back.
"It's all right," I soothed, "It's all right."
Her eyes opened slowly, fluttering, and looked Into mine through a mist. I had her then in a delicate moment of soft young desire, and I knew then that my real Rubicon was at hand. My hand grazed slowly down the front of her jersey, reassuring her with soft caresses, down to where it ended.
And then up under.
And found her breasts.
Hard they were-and yet soft, like ripe peaches in my hand. Incredibly warm and trembling like little sensitive nodes communicating tremors of excitement to my fingers. She shuddered back against my arm.
"No, don't. It makes me feel-all funny inside. You better not!"
"Haven't boys ever done this to you?"
"Well, yes-it feels different when you do it."
"It feels good, doesn't it?"
"Yes, only, God, it drives me crazy!"
Exactly what I wanted to do. I let my hand wander in the asylum under her jersey, until I could feel her tiny nipples stiffen like hard green cherries under my fingers. Her mouth opened to protest, but the protestation got no further than my own lips and tongue. Harder this time, stifling her words. Her back arched against my arm like a frightened cat's, and then, succumbing, relaxed. Our lips drew apart.
"I can't go all the way with you," she said, thick tongued from my kisses.
"You don't have to," I said. "Relax, June darling. I won't do anything you don't want me to."
Her breath was heavy, her face flushed with desire. Again I went berry hunting over the creamy hills under her jersey, finding sweet hard fruit and then wandering lower.
To the top of her orange slacks.
There was no resistance as my fingers slid under. There was only a tremor as she sucked in her breath and shuddered in my arm. My fingers crept downward under her panties.
And then she jumped as if an electric shock had run through her.
"OhI No, I'm afraid-"
"Come on, June honey-you've let boys do this before, haven't you?"
"Once or twice. B-But-I feel like I'm going to faint!"
I kept caressing. Her thighs trembled. And then, with my other hand, I began to pull her jersey over her head. And then, suddenly, she was squirming to help me.
Bare bosomed June was a delight to the eyes, the hands, and the mouth. Her breasts were like little pears, shapely and petite, two nice palms full with two stems for the lips to taste. She squealed and shook with pleasure as I touched them, running my hands all over that incredibly smooth skin wherever it was bare. And then my lips.
"I never felt like this before," she gasped. "I think I'm going to faint. If mother ever found out-"
"Mother won't," I said quickly, and then I pulled her down onto the couch and reached for the zipper on her slacks.
Zzzt! it went.
"Oh!" she went.
And then I had her pants half way down, the orange ones, and then the white panties, and my hand was inflaming her so that she was squirming and moaning.
And then I stopped.
"June. Do you want me to do this to you? m stop now if you want." I knew she wouldn't want me to stop.
"Yes, I want it, oh, don't stop now, do it to me do it to me, oh, I want it now!"
She was no longer June. She was a wanton little sexlet, as wanton as any hardened whore.
My hand went to my belt buckle, and there it froze. I had lost all track of time, but the sound of a car door slamming out front and Jeanette's voice brought me back to reality.
CHAPTER NINE
"There's a matter I've been wanting to discuss with you," I said one morning across the breakfast table to Jeanette.
Her lovely locks tossed up from her farina and one eyebrow arched inquisitively.
"What is it, dear?"
"Vacation."
She frowned; I bit into my toast and watched the apprehension cloud her pretty features.
"But-you're going to have yours this year, aren't you dear?"
"You are. I'm not." I held up my hand, coffee cup in it, to stave off her protests until I could chew my toast sufficiently to explain. She waited, bless her patience.
"It's like this, doll-baby. Mr. Dillworth's not long for the Westfoco Agency, if you know what I mean. He's been slowly breaking me in, letting me handle the higher-class cases, estate evaluations and like that. We've come to the point now where I'm going to have to do some homework."
"But darling," she interrupted, "We were looking forward to this year-"
I reached across the table and stroked her cheek. "I know. This sounds a little premature, but it's going to work out better in the long run. You and Joe and Wendy can go to your mother's in Buffalo. If things go well here, I can join you in a week, and then we'll have a week together, to do all the things we planned."
It placated her. A smile broke through the frown and her world was right once more, or at least repaired. "All right. If you think it's the best thing for you, then I won't complain. Only I'll miss you." Her hand closed over mine. I swallowed my guilt with another bite of toast, washed it down with a sip of Jeanette's excellent coffee.
And then it was gone.
I should have felt like hell. I should have felt Eke something you'd find under a toadstool, or a big, Oat rock. Something that crawls on its stomach in the dirt. It had been so easy. She'd accepted my lie so perfectly, reacted so completely without suspicion, that I could almost convince myself I had been telling the truth. Almost. And instead of guilt, I felt what amounted to a soaring, devilish glee.
"I'll miss you too, dear. But business is business."
Monkey business. A scouring of the Canarsie back streets for fresh young delights.
With no one around to frustrate my victories at the last moment.
"When do you want us to go?"
A good question. I had been so anxious to carry off the thing that I had neglected to consider an actual date. The sooner the better. But not too soon. I restrained the urge to say "Tomorrow." Instead, I said, "Next week would be as good as any, darling. You could catch a plane for Buffalo Sunday night. How does that sound?"
"Fine dear. I'll start getting things ready. I've got to send things to the cleaners and buy some clothes for the children-they're growing so fast, it's hard to keep them in anything long."
"You go ahead, then. I'll tell Dillworth next week's the week. Now, how about a kiss to take to work with me?"
We both leaned across the table and touched lips. A tender, moving domestic scene if there ever was one.
I went to work the next day, and the one after that. No thoughts had I of work, but I went. I did the necessary things, made the necessary motions, and smiled archly at Emily, who, I could see, was entertaining hopes of a repeat performance at Riverside Drive again. Those hopes were damned, but I smiled anyway, full of expansive good spirits toward all, now that my course of action had been decided.
July turned to August that week, but I knew that August would do the incredible trick of turning to June. She was never far from my thoughts. I kept her there, in a cage, just behind the doors of my conscious mind, to be released when-when I was released.
There would be June, and perhaps others. June by herself would be enough, but I did not want to put all my eggs in one blond basket. I knew that there was a possibility that I could not rely on seeing her again. So close had she come to losing her prized female possession that possibly she was scared out of her wits and would never come to my bower of forbidden pleasure again. This was a fear I did not dwell on, however. The chances were equally good that she was now as hungry to learn of the secrets of love as I was to teach her them. The chances were she was having very interesting dreams these nights.
Then there was the possibility she had told her mother or father.
I tried not to think about that-
If it should happen, I was prepared to accept things with fatalism. My jig would be very much up then; the dangerous game I was playing would come to an end, as would my life as I had known it. But I had gone much too far to turn back now. What I had already done was enough to permanently settle my hash, and the real choice prizes of my groundwork lay just around the next bend. The next week ... I kept my mind off it when I could, but nothing, not even the dullest office drudgery, could dull my bubbling animal exhilaration. I was like an embezzler working for a bank, who realizes he will hang just as high for the paltry amount he has already embezzled as he would for the big money, and consequently decides to make his thievery worth the penalty. I knew I had allowed myself to be trapped by my own forbidden craving, but I could laugh at this fateful fact now. I was enjoying it too much not to.
Chuck Hammond, one of my colleagues, chided me about my sudden sunny outlook.
"Hey, what's happening? You look like you just won the World Series pool or something."
"Hammond, your perspicacity is nothing less than amazing. However, it is not the World Series pool I've won. Something better than that. Two glorious weeks away from this salt mine."
"Oho, vacationville, hey? Bosso give the nod already?"
"I assume by 'bosso' you are referring to our esteemed employer, Jonathan Dillworth. The answer is no, but it's in the bag, baby. How can he refuse his star agent? I'm on my way in to see him now, as a matter-of-fact."
And I brushed past the young and eager Mr. Hammond and into the glassed-in inner office wherein Jonathan Dillworth, Esquire, sat upon his pinnacle of premium-paid power.
"Good afternoon, William," the shaggy white head said, "Sit down. I've been wanting to talk to you:"
"Good afternoon, sir." You always called him sir, even at office parties, where he had occasionally been known to make an appearance. Even Emily called him sir.
"Have a seat, William."
I had a seat.
"I suppose you're wondering why I called you in here this afternoon."
As a matter-of-fact, I wasn't. I wasn't even aware he had called me in this afternoon. I thought I had come in to see him, of my own free will. Dili-worth you're getting old, I thought, watching the small red veins lining his wattles.
"As a matter-of-fact, I had been wanting to see you myself, sir."
"Yes. Well, ah, nevertheless, you're here. A fact which facilitates discussion immensely. Much more so than Monday, when you weren't here, if I may remind you."
So that was it. An authoritarian of the old school, be couldn't let slip a chance for a reprimand. Employer-manager relationships have changed vastly in the last twenty years, but not as far as Dillworth was concerned. He was still living somewhere in the mid-Twenties.
"I'm sorry about that Mr. Dillworth," I said. "I was taken ill suddenly, kind of a flash virus, I guess."
"Yes." He invariably started his sentences with that word. "Yes, well it seems to be a common office affliction these days. However, never mind that. We look forward in the insurance business, not backward. Remember that. What I wanted to talk to you about was your work. I'm afraid, William, that it hasn't been up to par lately." He smiled waxenly. He obviously enjoyed this type of thing. "You've been neglecting."
I shifted in my chair, trying not to look humble or guilt-ridden. Dillworth had a way of making you want to feel like a little boy with his hand caught in a cookie jar.
"I wasn't aware of that, sir."
"May I remind you," he said unnecessarily, "That you have reached a stage in your association with Westfoco that requires your being aware? Consider yourself reminded. Consider this."
He shoved a piece of paper across the desk and under my nose, where I couldn't very well help considering it. My eyes immediately fastened on a name, a name they recorded numbly, and I had a sinking feeling.
The name was Gerald H. Krech.
"Slipshod work, Ramsen. Very slipshod. You approved a policy for this man."
"But everything seemed in order," I protested.
His wattles shook and his dewlap lowered like a wet, pink drawbridge. "In a very cursory fashion, one might say so. In the thorough and demanding fashion of a Westfoco employee, one would definitely say so. Definitely not, young man. Gerald Krech, if you had bothered to find out, is a known criminal, suspected of narcotics law violations, among other things."
I received the news in stunned silence. The gimlet eye of Jonathan Dillworth recorded my reactions. But it couldn't have recorded my thoughts. Had it been able to, it might have popped out of its socket in apoplectic surprise. I was thinking, while sinking slowly through my chair, that the whole damn universe had suddenly taken on an irrationality that was frightening. Or perhaps the basic irrationality of it had always been there and now, with jolting suddenness, it was being revealed to me. Things that had been totally disconnected were fantastically connecting themselves up in an imminent plot to overthrow the schemes of one William Ramsen What did Gerald H. Krech, an insurance applicant and narcotics dealer, have to do with a little blond girl named June Pearson? They lived in two remote, disconnected worlds.
Yet now, fantastically, these worlds had become joined.
I was the catalyst that joined them. Because somehow they were connected now, connected by dint of my designs on June, which one Gerald H. Krech now threatened to thwart.
I had fallen from favor, just as Lucifer had fallen from grace. I could no longer demand a vacation from the gray god in front of me, no longer demand the time needed to fulfill my schemes.
And all because of dear old Jerry and his reefers, or whatever it was he sold.
I could have killed him with my bare hands.
Dillworth's gimlet eye read little of this, but it read enough. He must have seen me blanch and put quite a different interpretation on my reaction.
"Yes, William," he continued, "Neglecting. That is precisely the word for what you've been doing. And not just in this, though I must say it represents one of the more spectacular instances of your delinquency. There have been complaints from a few clients you have neglected to keep appointments with. And your paper work in general has been slipshod for the last few weeks."
He pushed back from his desk and hooked both thumbs in his vest to deliver the summation of his inquisition.
"Bill, what's wrong?" He said.
Having gone from William to Ramsen to Bill in one interview left me a little giddy. My power to react temporarily atrophied, I said nothing.
Jonathan Dillworth half-turned and looked off somewhere in the area of the molding along the office wall. It meant he was ready to speak again. I let him.
"Perhaps you are aware," he began, "That you have for some time been under strong consideration to, ah, replace me in the event that I should, ah, retire, William. A continuation of your recent performance could well put such an enviable status in jeopardy. That would be unfortunate. You have a talent, a real feeling for the insurance business." He swivelled in his chair to face me again with a piercing, red-veined gaze. "Such talent should not be wasted!"
I muttered something like "Yes sir, thank you sir, I'll try not to let it happen again sir."
And then the Old Stone Face cracked into a smile.
"No sir, I do not believe in wasting talent," he continued. "I believe in conserving talent. I'm going to conserve yours."
It was a hell of a way to get fired. T hated to punch out an old man, but I was ready to do it. When I punched my last clock, they were going to hear it ring all over Fifty-Fourth Street.
"William," he said, drawing himself up like a pouter pigeon, "Today is Friday. Don't come in Monday."
I started to get up.
"Don't come in for three weeks, my boy. Have yourself a vacation!"
I sat back down, like a pierced dirigible.
Dillworth's grin was as broad as Times Square. "Go somewhere, my boy. Do things. Take the wife and kids to Florida. Go Mountain climbing in the Rockies. Get the staleness out of your system. Do whatever you want to do, but come back like that old Westfoco Whiz you used to be."
He reached a hand across the desk and I shook it, smiled, thanked him, and left, feeling like I had just got off the roller coaster at Coney Island.
The rest of the day was a breeze. I was so happy I went to the water cooler and left a bruise high on Emily's thigh.
That evening I took Jeanette to supper. We had saurbraten at Luchow's and saw a movie uptown, a foreign film about life in a nudist colony and a gangster film about the roaring twenties. We came back and relieved the babysitter, who fortunately wasn't June this time, but an old lady who knew Jeanette.
I was marking time.
Saturday I took the kids to the zoo. We had peanuts and popcorn and candy and fed the animals and every time I saw a blond girl in shorts something did somersaults in my solar plexus region.
I could feel the time drawing nearer and nearer.
Somehow I got through Sunday morning and then Sunday afternoon, and at last it was Sunday evening and time to drive my brood to the airport. I squeezed bags and suitcases into the trunk and back seat of the Chewy, tucked in the three of them, and away we went to the terminal, where there was much noise and confusion and shouting and kissing, and at last I watched the big Electra taxi down the strip, wing lights flashing in the dusk, and take off.
At last I was rid of them.
Driving back to Canarsie in the evening traffic was hard, but not as hard as I was getting thinking thoughts about a certain person who was going to share my home for a good part of the next two weeks.
I left the car in the driveway when I got there. The front steps I took in a bound, crashed through the front door, and panted up to the telephone.
And paused.
Again, the modern miracle presented to us by Mr. Bell presented me with a problem.
How was I going to talk to June? My voice was recognizable to either of the adult Pearsons, and what I had to say was much too shocking for adult ears. It needed ears much more tender to receive its message.
I could disguise my voice in the event June herself didn't answer, but the mantle of cloak and dagger seemed much to ridiculous for me to be able to carry it off successfully.
The hell. I picked up the phone anyway. There was an urgent stirring in a very certain place which made inaction impossible. I would see who answered the phone.
As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. No one answered.
I let it ring ten times just to make sure, and with each successive ring my heart sank a little lower, as did the urgent stirring. It was a very sad few minutes. I hung the receiver up reluctantly and cursed the mocking gods who were thwarting me in this, my finest hour.
I would not be thwarted, dammit I I had worked, labored in the vineyards, so to speak, and now I was going to reap. I searched furiously through the cards and papers in my wallet until I found the one with Sami Weinstein's number on it. I dialed.
And got no answer.
It was taking on the proportions of a major conspiracy. Part of a universal plot. I slammed the phone down and cursed.
Then I went to the liquor cabinet, drew out a hefty bottle of bonded bourbon, and sat down with it. A sad substitute it was, but I lifted it to my lips, cupping it with my hands as though it were a breast, and took a liberal draught of its scorching contents. Well, there was always Emily. I took another draught.
The hell with Emily. I consulted the oracle of the bottle a third time, and the bottle told me its deep, dark secret. "Go," it said, "And find thee a maiden fair among the streets of Canarsie." I patted the breast-bottle, set it down, and went to seek the answer to its deep dark riddle.
It was dark out. A hunter's moon hung bloodily in the sky as I stalked with my Chewy down avenues and side streets in the borough that only the dead know.
Avenue L was thick with thighs of all shapes and sizes and ages, but the bounty was a little too plentiful for successful shooting. I feared missing and hitting a cop. I heaped epithets on the blond head oi June, my wanton little nymph who had so grievously failed me in my night of need. Where was she? I imagined her in the car of some panting and acned im-competent whose clammy hands were running over the sacred ground I had worked so feverishly to claim for my own. Tart! If I saw her again I would ... But there was nothing for that. I turned down a side street and peeled its sidewalks bare with my lascivious eyes.
And at last I saw her.
She was walking in the same direction, and I slowed the Chevy to a crawl, riveting my eyes on her fundament that was like an advertisement for Marfak lubrication. She had on white shorts, full to the bursting point, and her thighs tapered down in slim tanned lines to bobby socks and canvas Keds. Her hair was a brown swath of ponytail bobbing between her shoulder blades. From the rear, she looked like the perfect candidate for the Ramsen bedroom.
I pulled apace and thunked the horn, and when she turned I knew I wasn't going to have any trouble at all. Her painted lips made a red gash in a face that was brazenly defiant, an attitude emphasized by the way she smacked a wad of gum between her jaws. I took her for a fifteen-year-old tart. She was not at all unpleasant to look at, first glance.
"Ride?"
She hesitated just about a second to show me she didn't get in anybody's car, gave me the once over, looked up and down the street, and got in.
"Where you going, mister?" she said, her eyes still hard.
I patted her thigh. "Where do you think?"
"Someplace where you can do more of that." She shifted away from me. I decided to play it hard right back.
"I'm going to do a hell of a lot more to you than that, sister."
"Oh yeah? What if I decide to get out of the car."
"You can, if you want to break your little neck. Let's be friends, huh?"
She thought it over while the car squealed around a corner and headed back toward the house. "Okay," she said around the gum finally, "But you better be nice to me. I can get you in real trouble."
"I can make worse for you."
"Let me out."
I slowed, just a little. "Look, honey, you got into the car, didn't you? Now why don't you just sit back and relax and we'll have fun together." I was itching to get my hands on her, but I wasn't going to be pushed around by a fifteen-year-old either.
She nodded sullenly. "Take me for a ride first. I like your car. I'll do what you want if you take me for a ride."
There was only one place I wanted to take her, but I decided it would be better to meet her half way.
"Where do you want to go?"
"Anyplace. Around."
I drove silently for awhile, turning down streets at random.
"What's your name?" I said finally.
"Susan."
"Mine's Frank."
"I bet it's not."
"What do you mean?"
"My name's not Susan and I bet you're not Frank. That's all."
Damn snotty kid. I was almost sorry I had picked her up, except she was in the car now and her naked thighs were stretched out in front of her, one almost touching mine. She had on a lot of makeup, eyeshadow and everything, but I could see she wasn't bad looking under it. Slight acne marks, but she wore them as an escutcheon of her age. A fifteen-year-old rebel. Tough, brassy, and just about as sexy as you can get in white shorts. Which is pretty sexy. My eyes kept shifting over to her legs, and it was becoming harder and harder to concentrate on driving.
"You're hard," she said. "Want me to sit closer?" She slid over without my asking.
She was wise. Too wise. I made up my mind I wasn't going to take her any place near my house. But where? I was feeling the urgency of finding some place more and more. And now that she was leaning against me, playing up to me, I felt like a time bomb with a sputtering fuse.
I hadn't been paying any attention to where we were going, but suddenly I realized we had reached a part of Brooklyn where streets dwindle off into nothing more than unpaved trails full of potholes. The car bumped and lurched down one of these and threw her hard against me, and this time my arm went around her and kept her there. It was impossible to drive that way. I pulled over into a vacant lot behind two heaps of dirt from an excavation.
It was a dead end of Brooklyn. A number of partially built houses stood in a row, mere brick shells without even the windows in them yet. The place looked deserted.
"We stopping here?" she said.
"Shut up," I said, and then I made sure she shut up by kissing her lips hard with my mouth, mashing hers into her gums. Her tongue came out at me instantly, like a flushed rabbit. The little tramp really knew how to excite you.
When I released her, she said "Jeeze, you hurt! You have to be so rough about it?"
"You seemed to be enjoying it."
"I don't like to taste my own blood. Give me a cigarette."
I gave her one. She lit it, the glow from the dash lighter making her face bright for an instant. With all the makeup, it made her look slightly like a female vampire. She sucked in the smoke deep into her lungs and blew it out in a thin stream through the window. She took several more drags, then flicked a good inch and a half of cigarette out the same place. It hit a tree and broke into a bunch of little orange coals which died instantly in the night.
"Okay," she said, "You want to give me the business. Here or in the back seat?"
She was nothing but a cheap little chippy and I was getting mad.
"Neither. Get out."
She laughed, throwing her head back. "Out? You brought me all the way out here just to have me get out and walk?"
"That's not what I mean at all," I reached for a blanket I had handy in the back seat. "For what I'm going to do there's not enough room in a car seat."
Her eyes grew wide and then narrowed. She didn't say anything. She got out of the car when I did and when I walked toward one of the brick shell buildings, she followed me. I had a pocket flash, but the ground was rough and we stumbled getting to it.
"Jeez, it's creepy out here," she said, getting closer to me.
"A good place for a rape," I said.
"No, none of that, mister. You can have what you want but I don't want no marks afterward. My mother'd kill me if she saw them."
I didn't say anything. It was quiet as hell out there, with nothing but a steady chorus of crickets for a background. We got inside the building easily, there being no door on it yet, and once inside we found a pair of stairs which led down to a cellar; Enough light came in so we could see what we were doing.
I spread the blanket out in a corner.
I reached for her. But she squirmed away.
"No, I don't like it down here. We go back in the car or I'm going home!"
That did it. I caught her by the ponytail and yanked her backward, hard, so she fell in a sprawling heap on the blanket. She yelled, but if anyone heard her, it was too late.
I leaned down and slapped her hard, across the face.
"Now listen, sister, goddamn you, don't give me any more crap or I'm going to beat you till you're blue I You don't know this, but my brother works on the Juvenile squad out here, so if you give me any more trouble I'm going to have him put your rear in some girl's reformatory until you're old enough to earn an honest living in the gutter where you belong, hear?"
The he was effective. I could almost see her turn white, there in the darkness.
"I won't," she said, her voice trembling, "Honest, I'm sorry, I won't make any more trouble!"
They're all the same-tough as nails until you slap them around a little bit and throw a scare in them. I reached down and pulled her shirt open, popping buttons. Her white bra glowed up at me in the dark and soon I had that off too. I didn't bother being gentle about it. She'd need safety pins when she got dressed again.
Her breasts were very nice. I squeezed them hard enough to make her groan, and held them like that, so she'd know I meant business. Then I got my clothes off. I didn't bother taking my shirt off. I also didn't bother taking her pants off. I didn't need to.
Not for what I had in mind.
Later, I'd take them off. I looked forward to that, too. The view I'd got of her from behind told me there was plenty in them to look forward to. But I could wait. She could keep them on a while.
Susan or whatever her name was had a very sassy mouth. She started to say something as she knelt, looking up at me.
She didn't get the chance to finish.
CHAPTER TEN
The world is pull of tough little girls like Susan, I soon discovered in my nightly wanderings. You can pick them up, give them a cigarette and a ride, and then you can do what you want with them. You get so you can spot them after a while. The hard look, the lips that sneer as easily as they smile; young girls out for a thrill and ready to have it with any man who dares take them up on it.
Three hours worth of Susan and you've had them all.
I got so I knew their haunts, where you could find them and at what time. Sometimes you waited outside movie houses till the show let out. You could go inside and try to pick them out in the dark if you wanted to; it wasn't too hard. But it was just as easy to wait till they'd gotten ready watching some phony screen hero make phony love to an expensive Hollywood trollop, watching alone because their boy friend had stood them up or they didn't happen to have a date that night or because they were just out looking.
I'd let them find me.
Then I'd take them home or to a drive-in or just for a ride to a cemetery or some place outside the city or something like that. I tried to keep it away from home as much as possible, but sometimes that was just too convenient not to pass up. Sure, it was dangerous. What I was doing was damn dangerous.
So's life.
I had an insatiable hunger that cut at me to the core, and one taste of honey just whetted my hunger for more, for a whole bucketful. I wanted all the tasty little tramps that walked the streets, all of them in the whole damned world. I got them as young as thirteen and never any older than sixteen.
They were all fine.
They were all worth it.
And by then I didn't care about the danger any more. After the first week of it you added up every score I made I had about a hundred and twenty years to serve anyway.
There's not much to worry about at that point.
Still, I tried not to be careless. I never let them think I was the kind of person they could take advantage of. It was easy as hell to lie to them, and if you acted a little bit tough, they swallowed the lie hook, line and sinker. They swallowed it because they had to, because they were too young to go any place to get the kind of the thing they wanted and old enough to want the kind of thing guys their own age couldn't always give them, or they wouldn't let them give them because then it was known. The real tough ones didn't care, but then there were those who did worry about getting talked about, who preferred a stranger to give them the business and preferred the stranger to be a man old enough to know how to give it to them good.
I gave it to them good.
And all the time it was driving me further and further on, instead of satisfying me.
One night I picked up two of them at once.
They walked alike, talked alike, and' were dressed alike. They both had cute little rears and my eyes flicked from one to the other as I followed them down the street. I think they knew I was following them. They stopped when they came to the neighborhood theatre, looking back and whispering to each other and giggling and I bought a ticket and followed them in. I followed them inside into the dim interior and down the aisle to seats way up front and near the side, where there weren't many other people sitting. I took a seat next to them and soon I began talking to them.
"Enjoying the show, girls?"
Giggles. One, a redhead, the one sitting next to me, said in a bored tone "Oh. its all right. I've seen better."
The other girl agreed. She was brunette, an agreeable brunette. Neither one of them was over fifteen.
"How come no dates?" I asked, smiling.
"Well, we get tired of boys all the time." The other giggled at this. "Yes. They're such drags."
"Well, their tough luck," I smiled, and let my hand rest on top of the redhead's. When she didn't bother to draw it away, I knew I was as good as in. For a while I worried about getting rid of the other.
"Look," I whispered to Red, "I think you're a cute kid and I'd like to take you someplace. But what are we going to do about your friend?"
"Nancy? Don't worry about her. Bring her along, she's lots of fun-you'll see."
I had my doubts but I kept them to myself. I played with Red until she was practically sitting in my lap, and her friend didn't seem to mind at all.
When I put my hand inside Red's blouse and felt her hard little boobs, she began to squirm all over me.
"You got a car?" she said.
I told her I had a car.
"Then why don't we leave this icky old show. It's getting too hot in here."
It was. Especially where I was touching her at the time. Her friend, Nancy, had a mouthful of popcorn. Red told her to finish it and she did and then we left, all three of us together.
They liked my car. I was used to girls their age mooning over it. It was only a sixty-two Chevy, but anything shiny and new with wheels never failed to impress them.
I drove them straight to my house.
"Hey," Red said, "You going to take us in there? Somebody lives there!"
"Don't worry," I reassured her, "They're friends of mine on vacation. I'm taking care of the place till they come back."
"Oh."
It seemed to satisfy both of them. It even added an extra dimension of excitement to the whole affair for them, doing what they were going to do in a house that belonged to somebody else. If I had told them it was mine, they would have been disappointed.
Nancy found the liquor cabinet right off.
"Hey, look at this! Hard stuff, just like my father drinks."
"Ever try any?" I asked, smiling.
They both shook their head negative.
"There's soda in the refrigerator. I'll fix you both drinks."
They went for the idea in a big way, like I was introducing them to dope or something. I made shots and ginger ale highballs for them in the kitchen, and they tasted them and made faces and laughed and drank more.
They got pretty high on a couple of drinks. Alcohol was really turning them on. I left them to their first carousing and went into the bedroom and took off my clothes, putting on a bathrobe. When I came out, they were as high as two Chinese kites.
"Well, girls, its time to have a little lookie at the bedroom."
Nancy and Red were fine in bed, anyway you looked at them, and that included a hell of a lot of ways that evening. Red and I got in the rack first, while Nancy watched, but pretty soon Nancy wasn't watching any longer.
I was confronted with little breasts and trim buttocks every way I turned, and turning was half the fun. Red proved to be extremely dexterous, the athletic type, and at one point I left the driving to her. She was fine, all in the saddle. She rode like a stallion while I played games with her friend.
"Kiss me there, kiss me there," she kept saying, and all the while Red was still riding hard, trying to beat the Indians to the pass.
I had to comply. The way she was sitting on me, she and Red could have had a face to face conversation. They could have compared notes and found out which was having the better time of it, It was probably a tossup.
We made a merry trio, but the time came to break things off and I had to send them reluctantly on their way. They were quite sober when they left. There is nothing better for reducing the effects of drink than some good, healthy exercise.
Each night I called June.
Each night no one answered the phone.
I began to realize with a growing sense of dismay just what had happened. The Pearsons must have gone on vacation. I decided to check and see one evening, walking down the block to the Pearson home. Sure enough, it looked deserted.
That was the night I started drinking again. It was bad. June had become an obsession within an obsession. That night I had come so close to attaining the sweet prize of her innocence had been the real kicker, the added weight to my dementia which had pushed me over the deep edge and caused me to plan my bachelor vacation.
But I was frustrated in my desire for her. Each night, roaming the streets for teenage trollops was only a substitute, a fill-in for my June goddess. I vas substituting them for her, and the substitutions became less and less adequate as I saw how easy the conquests were.
I was beginning to think there was no such thing as a teenage Virgin.
None of the girls I picked up on the streets could hold a candle to her. I wanted to hold a candle to her, but in a very different sense.
I think I was in love with her.
All I know is, after a bout in bed with one of my young harlots, I could feel only a deep, depressing emptiness after they were gone. It was too easy, like robbing candy from babies.
It was June I wanted.
June I desired, June, June, June-
So I began drinking.
I started, fittingly enough, at George's. I had Just taken Sami home, a very tired little Sami, too tired to walk. And then I drove back to my house and put the car in the garage and started to climb the steps.
But I couldn't face the emptiness of the house.
A ghost of a little blonde girl peddled a ghost bicycle down the sidewalk, and I realized I had to get away from there, that I was right back where I had started, wanting the impossible, the unattainable. June represented the essence of my malady.
It was only her body that held the cure.
So I turned from the door and began walking down the street, the way I had ages ago, when the whole thing had started. And before I knew it my steps had carried me directly to George's, and then I was inside hoisting myself onto a bar stool and hoisting shots and beers to my glutinous gullet.
"Hey, better take it easy Mr. Ramsen," George warned, "Them boilermakers sneak up on you!"
"Let them sneak, George, let them sneak. Tonight I'm celebrating my long lost true love."
George looked at me like I was crazy, not knowing that was exactly what I was, and shrugged. "Sure, sure, I know-we all get days like that. Go ahead, I'll get a cab for you if you fall off the stool Mr. Ramsen. Don't worry about a thing."
George underestimated either my capacity or the amount of sorrows I had to drown. They were vast. To do the job adequately would be like pouring liquor in the Grand Canyon. I poured and poured, and still they were there-still it was there; a flickering blond wraith in front of my eyes.
My whole being was directed toward that apparition.
George's face loomed suddenly out of the mist, grinning at me knowingly.
"I know how it is," the face said, "Married myself, fifteen years, matter-of-fact-ard I still get that old itch now and then. What you need, Mr. Ramsen is a strange piece. If you want, I can give you a number...."
I slid off the stool and oozed out the door before he finished the sentence.
It was funny. Damn funny. I laughed for four blocks, staggering as I went along, and hiccuping occasionally just for emphasis. Good old George knew just what I needed. Good old George had a number.
Shove it, George. You silly bastard, you don't have half the numbers I do. You don't have any number I need.
Because there's only one.
I found more bars. One thing you can always find is bars, and I found them. I don't know how drunk I got because I don't remember most of it. I remember going in and out of bars, and here and there a memory comes back of a street sign or building. I remember making a lot of little wet rings on the hardwood of many bars. Circles of rings, with the bottom of a shot glass. A circle of circles. With me in the middle.
I remember thinking about old Dillworth's advice. "Have a vacation. Have fun. Go climb mountains." Go take a flying leap off a short pier, Dili-worth. Go dry up and can yourself for a dehydrated ulcer. Go cohabit yourself.
I must have been thinking out loud at the time, because somebody next to me said "Hey, what did you say buster?"
It was a woman's voice, which made the somebody a woman. I remember turning and seeing something with black hair and possibly two eyes, a mouth and a nose. All of which kept weaving in front of my face like something on a movie screen gone awry.
She must have been drunk because I kept seeing two of her.
I think I repeated what I had said.
"That's what I thought you said. If I knew how, I'd do it, but it takes two to tango. Buy me a drink."
I bought her a drink. I guess I bought her many drinks, running up into the hundreds, because after that I didn't remember a thing.
Until I found myself in bed with her.
Don't ask me how she got there. Or how I got there, for that matter. We might have taken a train or a plane or a taxi, but we sure as hell didn't walk. I didn't anyway.
But we got there some way, and I remember helping her take her clothes off. She had on an amazing amount of clothes, or so it seemed. She started to undress herself but I demanded she let me do it, despite the fact I seemed to have about three extra fingers on each hand. Nevertheless, I was determined. I was also crazy drunk.
I got the dress, a tight black sheath, over her head after fumbling long enough with the zipper. She kept saying "hurry, hurry," but I paid no attention and went about it my laborious way. Finally I had her down to bra, garter belt and nylons. It was taking on the proportions of a vast project.
At that point I remember asking her name.
"Linda. Linda Thrasher," she said.
I thought that was funny. Linda Thrasher. "Do you thrash around a lot, Linda?"
That got her mad. "Look, mister, are you Just gonna stand there and make jokes or are you going to get down to it?"
"That seems like a good idea, Linda," I said, I didn't even have to undress her more to do it, either. The garter belt was black, and with the straps running down to the tops of her hose, made a cute frame around the part of her that attracted me. Standing there in black nylons and bra and garter belt, she looked sexier than she would have undressed, and since I had proved so incompetent in that necessary preliminary, I decided to dispense with it.
"Turn around," I said-She did, and it was just as cute from the back as it was from the front Cuter, in its own way. The garter belt did the same thing, framing the crease where her ample buttocks came together. The dark hem of the nylon tops half way up her white thighs completed the frame.
"You're as pretty as a picture."
"Thanks. Only I'm not a picture. I'm a real five woman and I like real live men."
So I showed her I was a real live man. I took my clothes off. But first I did what I had promised to do. I knelt on the floor in front of her and, running my hands over the backs of her legs, kissed her.
She appreciated it. She thrust her hips forward and rotated them and became a moving picture.
And I was in the center of the frame.
"Oh, that's it doll, do that, I love a man who'll do that to me, don't stop, please don't-stop-yet, keep it-up-up."
She kept talking like that in a steady stream of words as she churned and I became drunkenly lost in the world of her.
"There, there, now, n-ahhh!"
And then it was over.
But it was just the beginning.
After that, we tried to outdo each other for inventiveness, on the bed, on the floor, on the dresser and in chairs. We did everything conceivable and added a few more to the list.
It was good, in a drunken, mad way.
It was kicks.
I discovered every part of her anatomy like it was a new frontier. Up and down her nylon clad legs, up under her brassiere, everywhere. Making love to a woman dressed in nylons and garter belt and bra was a new kind of experience for me and I guess doing it that way was for her, too. We both went about it with equal enthusiasm.
When we had exhausted the ways of lovemaking, I fell asleep on top of her. The last thing I remember was the odd sensation of her nylon encased calf rubbing against the back of my leg.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I woke up the next morning not knowing what day it was or what world. It turned out to be a very bad world. Not the kind of world you'd want to wake up in at all. It had little pinwheels of red fire in it and bands of light like bars across your eyes. It was a teal bad world with real bad tastes and smells in it. Your mouth felt like a commode full of old cigarette butts, badly in need of flushing. There was a stench all around of aged-in-the-flesh sweat, like spoiled cottage cheese. A small man with a large hammer was subdividing the back of my head. There was also nausea down below, like bilge in the hold.
It was not going to be a nice day at all. That much I could tell without opening my eyes.
When I did open them, it was worse.
The bands of light came from the window. I had forgotten to close the Venetian blinds. The sun poured through the slits that way making horizontal right and dark bars across the yellow sheeted bed and also across a lump of pasty white flesh that lay there, next to me.
The lump was snoring.
Flared nostrils were pointing ceilingward and I could see the ugly little hairs inside vacillating back and forth as it, the lump, snorted and wheezed asthmatically.
I retched a dry retch and looked again.
Nightmare alley. Lumpy Linda was sprawled across the bed in an attitude that would have mollified the Anti-Sex League. Her ponderous spread breasts spilled around the edges of the black brassiere, moving in a disgusting parody of breathing. Whatever I had seen last night in my Dionysiac Bacchanalia was gone, forever gone. It never existed. All those lovely charms my eyes had seen and my lips had tasted were grotesquely satirized now in the sober light of day.
I was in bed with a pig.
Her slack-fleshed thighs spread like the portals of Hell, or some place worse. Each place my eyes looked they found a new fold of gray flab. She still had on the garter belt, but the straps had worked loose and now it was up around her waist and the black nylons were loose and wrinkled around her legs, like moldy excresences.
I cringed away from her and got out of bed. It was like leaving a garbage scow. My legs got me as far as the bathroom, where I emptied some of my sickness in the toilet. Just a small part of it. The rest was a rottenness in the marrow of my bones.
The mirror told me no lies. My eyes looked like a color TV set test pattern slightly out of focus. I had a stubble of burnt crab grass around my chin and jaws. My hands trembled like a spastic's as I opened the medicine cabinet and knocked three bottles into the sink before I found the aspirin. I managed to down a handful of them with some water and it felt like swallowing chalk golf balls. Then I got in the shower stall, fumbled with the faucets, and let the rains of Hell beat down on me. I couldn't even tell if the water was hot or cold. I just knelt there, shaking.
After a while I got out, limp as a dishrag. My stomach kept going up and down like an elevator gone haywire and I knew I'd never be able to cope with life again until I did something to settle it. I dreaded going back into the bedroom, but that was where the whiskey was. I toweled feebly, dropping the towel on the floor and leaving it there rather than risk bending over to pick it up.
My eyes avoided the bed. A three-quarters empty bottle of Stoll's 93 was on the dresser and I made toward it like a lost sailboat spotting a buoy in a mist. My hand closed over the neck and tilted it up and the liquid spewed down past my lips and for a minute I knew that the inside of a hot battery feels like. The Stoll's hit bottom like a midget with spiked shoes perforating an ulcer. There was an immediate Newtonian reaction which doubled me up with the effort to keep it down. My eyes squeezed shut and tears ran down my cheeks, but I held it. I knew if I could hold that, my stomach would be okay, temporarily. And it worked. When the hell was over I could stand up straight again and maybe even walk.
It woke up then.
"Uh-oh, hi there honey-wha time is it?" I had to look at it to talk to it. "It's time for you to get out of here."
It sat up, stringed hair like limp black snakes, turning me to stone.
"Hey! You got no call to talk to me like that!" I waited for it to swing its legs over the edge of the bed and stand up.
"Okay, get out," I said, teeth grinding. Half my horror would be gone when she left. "-you Jack," it said.
I hit her then. I don't know where I got the strength, but it wasn't even a considered action. My balled fist just came up out of nowhere, of its own volition, and buried itself in her stomach. She staggered back against the bed, doubled over, wheezing. Then my fist came down like a hammer on the back of her head and she didn't even have the breath to scream with as her face plunged into the carpet.
It felt good. It felt like just what I needed. If she hadn't said anything this wouldn't have happened to her, but she had and now I was glad. I reached down and grabbed a clump of her hair and picked her up by it. It was funny watching her jaw sag open and her eyes pop wide. She obviously thought she was screaming but no sound was coming out.
I dragged her by the hair to the bathroom and pushed her face down in the commode and flushed it. Then I straightened her up and punched her in each breast before I let her sink to the floor, a sobbing, whimpering mass.
"I ought to keep you around just for hangovers, sweetheart," I said, "But I couldn't stand the sight of you that long. If you're not out of here in three minutes I'm going to stuff you down there again, piece by piece this time."
She crawled out of the bathroom on her hands and knees. I watched her. Somehow, it was important to watch her. It was as disgusting a sight as you can think of, but it was significant too. In a way, Linda had done me a big favor. She helped me make op my mind about something. I was done with them.
After she left it took me most of the afternoon to straighten out. I babied my stomach back to a semblance of normality with V-8 juice and raw egg cocktails. The midget with the hammer got tired and gradually slacked off. The first cigarette made me dizzy and sick all over again, but I managed to smoke it and after a while the second.
It was about four-thirty when I picked up the phone. Even then, my hand trembled slightly.
But it was not all from the hangover.
I dialed the number I had been dialing for over a week. I didn't bold my breath or anything like that. When a man makes up his mind and knows what he is going to do exactly, he is past being nervous to that degree.
I knew what I was going to do.
Jim Pearson's voice answered.
"Hello? Hello, who's this?"
I put the receiver gently back in its cradle. He bad told me all I wanted to know.
I had some shopping to do after that The store I had in mind was down on Pitkin Avenue, and it would still be open. I dressed casually, had a drink, and went down to the garage and got the car out.
Pitkin was about twenty blocks away and the store I stopped in front of had a big red and blue sign over it which said ARMY & NAVY, SURPLUS AND SUPPLIES. I parked the car in front of a hydrant, not caring whether I got a ticket, and went in. I knew they would be glad to see me.
It would probably be their biggest sale of the day.
After that I went to a delicatessen and got a six pack of beer and some cold cuts. The next stop was a garage, where I had the car lubricated and the oil changed and the gas tank filled. Before I left I picked up a road map, just for the hell of it, I really didn't think I'd need it, but they're free, or at least you don't realize you're paying for them. Nothing is really free, I thought, not even the air you breathe. The only time things are free are when you take them without asking.
When I got back to the house I watched TV for a while. It was around suppertime and not much would be doing. I opened the cold cuts and made myself a thick sandwich and broke out a can of beer and then I sat back down in front of the TV set again. I sipped the beer and munched the sandwich and watched an old Thirties' film, something called "A Hound of Mist and Thrums," with a lot of Eskimos and men wearing animal skins in it. It was a grade Z film, but I watched it, enjoying the camera shots of the Great-Out-of-Doors. It put me in the mood for what I was going to do.
When it was over, I tossed the empty beer can on the carpet, turned the TV off, and went to the garage and puttered around a bit, fixing things up neat in the car.
After that there was not much to do but sit on the stoop with my six pack and wait. I had no idea how long it would take. Maybe a couple of days. I was in no particular hurry. I just opened cans of beer and sipped them slowly, taking the evening sun.
At about seven the parade started again. Girls, teenage girls, going places, some dressed up, some in slacks or shorts. Blondes and redheads and brunettes in ponytails and pixiecuts and bangs and whatnot. I watched them and sipped my beer and it seemed as though I was right back where I had started, but I wasn't.
Everything was different.
Everything was changed.
I was changed.
Desire was no longer a fever or a panic, but just a low, steady, controlled throb. To any neighbor who might have been watching I looked like the old Bill Ramsen, relaxing at his doorstep.
But I wasn't him at all. I was somebody else. It was just a pose, sitting there with beer can in my hand, smoking idly. A disguise. I had the sharp eyes of the hunter.
The hunter who waits very patiently for his prey.
His very special prey.
I ignored all the cute waddles and hip swayings of the seductive little things in tight pants. That is, I noted them and appreciated them, but I didn't get emotionally involved in them. I eyed them like the experienced connoisseur eyes a glass of fine wine. But the rest of my brain was alert to my real purpose for being there, alert to that only.
I had worked my way through four cans of the six pack when she showed up.
She was walking. She wore a neat blue blouse and a white pleated skirt this time and she looked like a real blonde-headed queen in miniature. She didn't say "Hi, Mr. Ramsen" this time. Her eyes were like a startled doe's when she saw me sitting there, and her step faltered uncertainly.
I smiled.
"Hello," I said. "Come on over." She hesitated a second, as if making up her mind, and then she came. "Long time no see."
"We went away for a week"."
"So I guessed. You're back now."
"Yes."
"I missed you."
"Oh. Well ... I guess I sort of missed being around, too." Her eyes were very demure. She was very embarrassed, but she didn't want to admit the embarrassment to herself. She changed the subject.
"How's your wife?"
"Fine. Got a letter from her today."
"Is it nice in Buffalo?"
"She likes it."
"Gee, that's nice...."
She was sitting on the top step below me and my eyes kept travelling up and down her legs and she knew it.
She shifted uncomfortably.
"How come you didn't go with her?" she said.
"I had a job to finish here."
"Is it finished."
"No. But it will be, pretty soon now."
She gave me a long look with her blue eyes and when she read my meaning they grew wider and then turned away and her cheeks turned a pretty pink.
"I guess I better be going."
I shook my head. "No. I haven't finished the job yet, remember?" I reached out and touched her bare upper arm, feeling the little golden hairs under my fingers. "You've got to help me finish it," I said in a low voice.
"I ... I don't think I want to."
My hand closed tighter. "Yes you do, June. You know you do, don't you? Remember how good it felt that time when I had my hand there? I'll do that again for you June, nice and slow this time." I let my hand trail down her arm and touched her palm with my finger, letting her know what I would do.
I could see a tremble of excitement on her lips, but she was scared, as well.
"Don't be frightened, honey," I whispered, "Well go for a ride. A nice long ride somewhere and I'll buy you something nice and then we'll come back. Just for an hour or two, all right?" I squeezed her palm between my thumb and forefinger at the end of the question.
"Well...." her breath seemed to catch in her throat. "Well all right, but I've got to be home by nine."
We drove all the way through Brooklyn and to the Whitestone Bridge before she began to get scared again.
"I think I ought to go back," she said, her voice -edged with fear.
It was dark. I knew this was the crucial part of my plan and I was desperate to find a place. My eyes caught a sudden glimpse of a dark side street and I turned down it, parked, and pulled the emergency brake. We were under a lamp post and the lamp wasn't working.
"You don't want to go back, June," I said, pulling her close. My hand went immediately to her blouse and inside it. She had a bra on this time, heaven knows why, so I kissed her on the mouth while my hand worked to unfasten it.
It was as if she was primed. It was as if the working over I had given her that night on the couch in my living room had never been interrupted, or as if it had charged her with an overload of voltage that she had had to carry around with her all the intervening time, desperately needing to release it.
Her reaction to my hand on her breast was instantaneous. She stiffened, and then she melted against me, panting. My lips crushed down her mouth like they wanted to choke her. My hand went from one breast to the other like a berserk windshield wiper.
I drew back. "Now do you want to go home?"
"My breasts! God, don't leave go of them!"
That was her answer.
Again she was my little wanton, my passion slave.
I did leave go of her breasts, but only to run my hand up under her skirt and inside her panties. Her legs were trembling. She squirmed at the touch and her body went wild. I knew I wasn't going to have any trouble then, but I kept caressing just to make sure. It was dangerous as hell, doing that on a city side street with a girl her age.
But then, child kidnapping is dangerous as hell no matter how you look at it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
To any deer hunter who happens to pass through these woods I suppose I look just like another of their ilk. The converted British Enfield is a good enough sporting piece and looks very convincing. They sell them cheap at the Army and Navy stores and I have plenty of ammunition to go with it. Enough to fight off a small army.
I'm not up in the Catskills for deer, though. Unless you want to consider the two-legged variety. And even then I wouldn't qualify, because I had brought mine with me. A very sweet and increasingly subservient little dear.
Oh, she rebels.
She has her periods when she cries and demands to be taken home, but I've learned how to handle her.
I've learned her likes and fears. She likes to be made love to in certain ways, ways I alone taught her, and I use that. She fears the whip. And I use that, too.
Never indiscriminately. Never kick a good thing, I always say. Only when she gets real bad and talks about running away do I use the whip. And even then I try not to leave too many welts on her tender buttocks. I enjoy their normal smoothness too much. There are better things for them, much better things, than whipping. Still, sometimes it's necessary....
I suppose I'm quite mad now. I suppose any man who lets a compulsion become an obsession is quite mad. But everyone has compulsions they would like to pursue, don't they? And once you let them get the best of you, let them become a little bit more than just an idea ... well, you end up something like me, I guess. It's like the man who entertains the secret vice of stripping women naked in his mind as he sees them on the street. A compulsion. Now, if one day the compulsion were to become just a little too strong for him to confine his secret vice to his mind ... well, then he's in real trouble. Like me.
Like you, maybe.
It could happen.
If it ever does, you'll come to know how flimsy are all those things normal people are impressed and restrained by. Laws, moral ideas, crotchets of little old ladies who, being barren themselves, seek to destroy the pleasures of others. Once you take that first step, you'll understand how flimsy man-made laws are. They'll lose all meaning for you until ... well, until one day comes the impact of a bullet. Their only meaning lies in that instant, and in no other.
But, in my own way, I'm moralizing. What I really want to do is tell how good it was. How fine and lovely and wonderful it was to bring June to my rustic mountain hideaway.
Perhaps the good of a thing is measured against how much you have to give up to attain it, as the philosophers say (I've been doing a lot of reading up here, there being not much eke to do except that, and a man needs rest between times, unfortunately).
I gave up everything. That is, I gave up everything society tells a man he is supposed to want. Success, a home, a family, and a TV set. A loving wife and two fine children. I could very easily have been the most contented man in the world, like old Dillworth. I could have led a normal, contented life of days filled with the sunny laughter of my offspring and nights with a loving, beautiful wife, and here and there an affair or two (dear Emily) of the normal, inconsequential sort. Cocktails Saturday and golfing Sunday, that kind of thing.
Instead I followed an impulse.
I threw everything away, like that, in one grand sweep. And you want to know if it was worth it?
Let me tell you.
We drove that night, and June never left my side after the side street caper. We drove on and on, out of the city, up over Parkways along the waters of the Hudson. We drove and she snuggled close to me and I began to drive with one hand only.
The other I kept quietly, casually busy.
I was right about June. She had a streak in her which she didn't even know about, a core of it that ran deep in her body and erupted spectacularly once touched properly. I made sure that it was touched often, at regular intervals, before she had a mind to beg out of the whole thing again.
It wasn't long before she realized she wasn't going home that night.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked. "I don't want to get into trouble."
She had a right to be afraid, poor thing, and I didn't want to upset her unduly that first night, so when we came to a service area I stopped and we had supper and I pretended to call her parents and tell them that she was staying over with Jeanette that night since I had to leave town on business. She seemed to accept that. I could tell she wanted to accept it, and that was half the battle. Her face was in a constant flush of desire, even there in the restaurant, as a result of my careful preparations.
"I told you we'd have fun, didn't I?" I smiled over my minute steak and french fries.
Her lovely eyes grew dreamy as I touched her under the table. "I don't care," she said. "I know it's wrong but I don't care. I feel tingly all over and I don't care, as long as you take me back tomorrow."
Tomorrow was another day. It wasn't at all necessary to tell her I wasn't going to take her back tomorrow. Or ever. She had such a wonderful glow to her face that I had no desire to spoil her enjoyment. Or mine.
We finished eating and went back to the car and there in the semi-darkness of the parking lot I loosened her blouse and removed her ridiculous bra, tossing it in the back seat among the camping equipment, and kissed her breasts up to a fine state of excitement.
Then we drove on.
At a point almost midway up the Hudson we turned off the parkway and began the long climb up into the heart of the Catskills. By the soft caress of her golden hair on my shoulder I discovered that my little June goddess had wandered off to the land of Lethe, a soft smile playing about her lips, illuminated by the green glow of the car's instrument panel. I let the perfume of her hair excite soon-to-be-realized fantasies in my own febrile brain.
It seemed eternities, but at last we got there.
It was little more than a cabin of rough hewn togs, high up in the thin cold Catskill air. But it was more than enough for my-our-purposes. It had a table and chairs and-most important of all-a bed. I left my child concubine in the car while I went out and smashed the lock. The noise awoke her.
"Where are we?" she said, her voice thick with sleep. It was all a dream to her, I guess.
"We're home," I said, lifting her from the car and carrying her over the threshold and inside. I eased her gently on the bed. I didn't bother lighting the kerosene lamp on the table. I closed the door, blocked it with a chair back under the handle, more for the sense of security it would afford than for any danger we faced, and went to her.
I took off my clothes silently, listening to the sweet sound of her rapid breathing.
And then I began to take off hers.
There was not much. There was the blouse, already open, and no bra to bather with this time. Nevertheless I worked slowly, gently, wanting her to enjoy every minute of it as much as I did.
Then came the shoes, and then two little tugs and her socks followed. Her skirt. She had to lift herself to allow it to pass under her, and she did. The panties. I lovo the feel of them, the smooth yet hard and lively feel of the material they choose to wear next to their skin. I slipped them down over her lovely legs, my hands a better substitute for eyes in appreciating their graceful slender curviness. That was all.
The bed sagged a little more as I got on it next to her and folded in her warmth to me. I held her a tense moment, feeling the laboriously stoked excitement rekindled in her body, her hard nipples two burning holes in my chest And then I began kissing her.
I was hard with passion myself, but I wanted to torture that little body with kisses, with the desire that she had tortured in me that day of the bicycle and the pumping, swaying buttocks.
I wanted her to feel that.
And she did. Her body arched and writhed under my mouth, with an intense heat that seemed to consume its compact beauty. Her skin trembled wherever my lips touched her. There was not a place they didn't
"Will . ... will you hurt me?" she said, her voice small and husky.
"Yes," I breathed, "In a very wonderful way, and just for a minute. Then it will be good again."
And then I was against her, up against her trembling body, pushing, forcing....
She screamed. "No! It hurts!"
But I moved again, harder, and the scream died in my ears to a low steady moan. I kissed and caressed her, soothing her with soft little words, easing her, slowing my own passion, waiting.
And then she was with me. Then she could feel it and she was with me and we were both moving this time, desperate to get more of each other and I could no longer hold back or keep from hurting her.
It drove her wild. I could feel I was hurting her but she didn't care this time and I could have killed her if I wanted to. She had been a child and then a woman and now she was hot, pulsing animal underneath me and I was annihilating her with my passion and she didn't care.
We moved and climbed like a car grinding slowly up a mountain, reaching levels and staying there and then reaching higher levels.
Till there were no higher ones to reach.
We were there at the top and the night spilled hot white comets onto the bed and around us. The mountain rocked. And it was over.
I began kissing her and talking to her then, until I realized she wasn't hearing me.
She was unconscious.
That was the first time.
There were other times after that, and some of them were as good, but none of them ever better. We tried other ways. We began going chronologically through the history of love. Out in the cool woods, night or day, or in the cabin, we were constantly experimenting, finding new ways to know each other. And we still are.
That's how it was. That's how it is. Now this minute, that's how it is, but the next time it may not be.
The trick is to live in the particular minute, and no further. Because it has to end. One way or another, it all has to come to an end. Any number of ways, it can end.
One thing I haven't told you, but you've probably already guessed. June hates me. Everything I've said is true; about the love-making and how she likes it and needs it. She loves me, in her way. But she also hates me, the way a prisoner will always hate his captor. She knows she's a prisoner now; there are no more lies I can tell her to convince her otherwise. So I don't try. I just use the whip when it's necessary, or take her to bed when she gets that look in her eyes.
It can't last. I wonder when it will end sometimes, and as I sit cleaning my Enfield Special I wonder why it hasn't ended already.
One of them has to find us.
I wonder if it will be Jim. It would be fitting if it was. His daughter.
His cabin.
I hope it won't be him that stops the first bullet. Maybe it will be me.
