Lust has no rule book and sin wants only a partner. So when handsome young Jim Collins, a stud on the prowl, saw a chance to sample the charms of the red-headed sex bomb, Ronnie, he plunged in for as much as he could take. And there was Lisa, the dark and passionate one who set his blood on fire along the easy-living, wild-fleshed shores of the California coast. And there was Kelly, the wanton mistress who lived with one man and got her kicks with any other guy who came along-and Jim arrived at the proper place at the proper time. It was a ball, a panic, and to hell with morality until the day Jim found out that Lisa the beautiful, Lisa the wanton goddess was his own sister ... But even then he couldn't stop. His lusting feet had carried him too far down the sin-trail to degradation. And even the knowledge that his incest could only lead to shame and death-even that didn't stop him. Not until he heard the wailing scream of a suicide's plunge did he know that it was too late....
CHAPTER ONE
There was this beautiful girl named Lisa.
I met her. I fell in love with her.
I went to bed with her.
She turned out to be my sister.
That's the story of my life, in five quick sentences. A whole lot of pure hell summed up in not very many words. It's easy to set it down on paper, a whole lot easier than to live through it.
Maybe you don't even care, though.
Maybe you're saying, "So he slept with his sister? So what? Doesn't everybody?"
Or maybe you're saying, "He slept with his sister? How utterly revolting! I don't want to hear another disgusting word about it!"
Well, perhaps you don't want to listen, but I've got to tell. It's all got to come spouting Out of me sometime, and it may as well happen now. If you don't want to listen, go away somewhere and hang by your thumbs. This is the thing that happened to me, and I've got to get it out of my system.
The first thing you ought to know is that we didn't grow up together, Lisa and I. Right away that changes the picture a little, doesn't it? Because as anybody ought to know, when you grow up all your life with a girl, you don't have real sexual desire for her. Not when you've seen her from the age of nothing up, not when you've taken baths with her, watched her nose run, watched her get her first bra two years too early. I know, there are some horny guys who still go after their sisters under those conditions, but I'm not that type at all. What happened to me was pure accident, in a way; and I tell you that not to justify myself but just to make it clear at the outset that the story isn't as revolting as you may have thought I'm not a pervert at heart. If I had had free choice and full understanding of what was going on, I would never have gotten into the whole thing.
Do we ever have free choice, full understanding of anything? Well, maybe not; but at least our eyes are usually wider open than mine were when it happened.
You know the story of Oedipus, don't you? Sure you do. It's the great myth of our times. If you've heard the name of Freud, you know all about Oedipus.
Oedipus didn't want to shack up with his mother. The prophecy had said he would, and he went so far as to leave home so it wouldn't come true. What he didn't know was that he was leaving the home of his foster parents and going to the city of his real parents, and then all the trouble started.
I feel a real kinship with old Oedipus. What he went through with his old lady, I went through with Lisa. It wasn't any picnic for either of us, believe me. Oedipus got out of it okay, more or less, if you don't count the scars on his soul and the fact that he put his eyes out in horror at what he had done.
Lucky Oedipus.
Let me start at the beginning, though, and fill you in on the background. Before you start judging me or judging Lisa, you ought to have some of the facts at hand.
My name is Jim Collins. A good, simple, American name-nothing fancy, like Oedipus. I was born in Philadelphia and I was twenty-four years old when all this happened. My mother was a librarian. I grew up with her, and she died when I was twenty. My parents were divorced when I was around five or six, and my father headed for the West Coast. I forgot all about him fast, and can't remember a single thing about him from the days when he was living with my mother.
There was also a sister. Name of Lisa. Two years younger than I am. She went west with my father when my parents divorced. I don't remember her, either. There were some photos of her in my mother's album, and I would look at them from time to time. They showed a skinny little dark-haired girl in frilly dresses.
I would say, "Who's that, Mom?"
And she would say. "That's your sister Jim."
And I would shrug. The whole idea oi having a sister was unreal to me. Other kids bad sisters, and brothers, and even fathers-; but I just had Mom, and Mom had me.
One of the photos in that album was a real lulu, from the point of view of prophecy. It had been taken at the beach at Ashbury Park, New Jersey, during happier times for the Collins family, and it showed Lisa and me romping around in the nude-the two of us, holding hands and facing the camera, wearing nothing but a big wide grin. The date stamped on the back of the picture told me that I had been four when it was snapped, and Lisa two. Very, very innocent, two babes in the buff.
Later on, when I was about ten and for two or three years afterward, I spent a lot of time studying that picture, even using a magnifying glass. I had a sisterless boy's curiosity about what little girls looked like naked, you see, I would peer at that photo endlessly. Of course, a two-year-old girl doesn't show very much of anything, but I didn't have anything better to satisfy my curiosity, not then. And there I was, at ten already getting interested in my sister's naked body, not knowing the dirty trick fate had in store for me. By the time I had completely forgotten Lisa in the flesh, you understand. Mom and I never heard from her or my father after the divorce.
I grew up. In Philadelphia. I grew tall and skinny, and then I filled out; and I began to realize I was going to be pretty good-looking. I entered high school and started taking out girls, and before long I had acquired a pretty good idea of anatomy without needing to stare at that faded photo any more.
I got my knowledge piecemeal over a couple of years. When I was fourteen a girl named Janie let me look at her breasts. She was thirteen, but well developed for her age, and when she took her blouse off and then started to unhook her bra I could almost hear drums rolling in the distance, and trumpets giving off a fanfare.
They were good breasts. They were big and round and the nipples were very pink and when she giggled her breasts swung from side to side. She walked all around the room, letting me see the profile and all.
"Let me hold them," I said.
"No. That's naughty."
And she put her blouse and bra back on again. That night I thought I would go wild with sex: I felt real pain. Janie had heated me up terrifically. Well, fourteen-year-old boys have a pretty good way of easing their frustrations, and I don't need to go into all that. And at least I could now say that I had seen a girl's breasts.
Janie must have figured she had gone too far, because she never let me get alone with her again. But that didn't matter, because when I was fifteen I started dating Mickey and Mickey had even bigger breasts and she let me touch as well as look. I used to strip her to the waist and lie there holding and squeezing, and then I learned how to take her boobs to my lips and kiss the nipples. That warmed her up tremendously, and one date she gave me a memorable time. I had been fooling with her breasts and suddenly she started fooling with me. I closed my eyes and imagined all kinds of pleasant things, and then it happened and I felt good all over.
Mickey and I might have gone on to wonderful things, but then her family moved to Chicago. At this point I was still technically a virgin, I guess. The next important girl was Carol, who let me find out what the female anatomy looked like below the waist. By now that faded photo of the two-year-old girl was awfully unimportant to me.
I would go over to Carol's when her folks were out. She would take off all her clothes and I would take off all mine. Then we would hug and kiss and feel and curl up together on the couch. What we did wasn't really sex, not in the grownup way. Carol was terribly afraid of getting pregnant. And, she said, she was "saving herself for the night I get married."
The way I figured it, she wasn't saving very much. But a lot of girls think the same way-that if they only go 99 % of the way with a boy, they can tell their eventual husbands with straight faces that they were virgins. I didn't really care, with Carol. I never went home from her place unsatisfied.
Then I was sixteen and shaving every day and I looked nineteen or twenty and when I had the dough I would go to the little cabarets to watch the strippers. People who don't know Philadelphia think of it as a strait-laced; puritan town, and in many ways I guess it is. But it has cabarets with strippers and B-girls, or at least it had them when I lived there. For the price of a couple of beers you could watch a girl take off practically all her clothes while doing a tap dance on the bar, or something along those lines.
I met Velma at one of those cabarets. And Velma de-virginized me.
She was a stripper. She was about nineteen, which seemed enormously old and worldly-wise to sixteen-year-old me. Now that I look back, I see that she was just a kid-a scared kid, at that. She was a slim blonde with long eyelashes and long legs and small but very nice breasts. Every night at this little place she would strip down to pasties and a G-string and dance on the bar, shaking her breasts and wiggling her fanny at the customers, and I fell in love with her, in a manner of speaking.
She also doubled as a B-girl, and I finally got up nerve to buy her some drinks. We would talk, and I began to think of her as a very unusual person. She read books, and so did I: we had both read The Catcher in the Rye. It was that kind of romance.
After the ninth or tenth time I had talked to her, I downed a couple of whiskies for Dutch courage and said, as suavely as I knew how, "Could I take you home tonight, Velma?"
She fluttered those long lashes at me. "I'd love it, Jim," she said softly.
"What time are you through here?"
"Three," she said.
I phoned home and told Mom I was sleeping over at a friend's house. Then I sat around in that dingy cabaret counting the minutes till three. I picked up Velma at the side door, we headed for Market Street, and I found a cruising cab. I only had five bucks on me, so if Velma had lived way out of town the cab ride would have ended pretty embarrassingly But she lived nearby-a buck and a quarter by cab-in a brownstone rooming house.
We went inside. I wondered: did seeing her home mean just that, literally, and was I supposed to leave now? She supplied the answer. We kissed in the vestibule and her lips were hot and soft and warm and then she husked, "Would you like to come up for a little while?"
"I'd love to," I said.
We went upstairs. She had a little shabby place with furniture that must have come from the Salvation Army, cheap religious pictures on the walls, of all crazy things, and a lot of battered paperback books. She fixed drinks for us, and then we kissed some more. Then she volunteered to do her act for me-only there were no pasties, no G-string in the way this time. In a little while she was naked and I went to her, cupped one hand over the-little swell of her left breast, put the other on the smooth, velvety roundness of her behind, and we went to bed.
I hadn't realized sex-real sex-could be that good. I thought my adventures with Mickey and Carol had taught me what it was like, but they hadn't meant a thing. To fool around like that wasn't a bit like having Velma's strong thighs wrapped around me, like having Velma's body pushing and thrusting against my own, her hard-tipped breasts crushing into my chest, her hips moving, her face distorted from excitement. And the soft warmth of her, the gentle inward quivering, the spasms of pleasure, and then the grand finale, with both of us heaving and panting and the ultimate moment of sizzling pleasure-oh, no, I had never had anything like that before. I hadn't even dreamed it could be that way. When it was over, I used Velma for a mattress: she held me tight, and I lay there until my heartbeat got back to normal.
We had a little love affair. It lasted three weeks and Velma taught me more about sex than most men probably learn in three years, or three hundred. Then one night there was this big, greasy guy around thirty waiting to take her home. She gave me an apologetic little smile, and that was that. I never went to bed with her again. About a year later I heard she had gotten knocked up and died having an abortion, but I never knew whether that was the truth or not.
Velma. I still have a warm spot in my heart for her. Velma Louise, and no last name. Her real name was probably Mary Lou Klotch, or Sarah Dwiggins, or something like that. Velma Louise.
When I met Velma I was a boy. Three weeks later, when we broke up, I was a man.
After that there were plenty of girls. I knew how to find them, I knew how to get their clothes off, I knew how to make them say yes, and I knew how to give them a good time. I did all right. Eventually I even got a little bored with sex, I was getting so much of it, and there was a stretch of about two months when I was eighteen that I didn't even try for any. I had a platonic romance with a skinny little girl named Harriet. We held hands and she told me all about Mozart and Beethoven. For a while I felt spiritually ennobled, above the mere flesh. Then I began getting bored, and after that I started getting hungry for it again, and one night I slipped my hand up Harriet's dress and she socked me and that was the end of my platonic period. Inside of three days I was happily balling a chick named Maureen.
Around this time. I graduated from high school with pretty good grades, especially in the sciences. For a while I thought of going to college and becoming an engineer; but my mother simply didn't have the money for it, and there weren't any scholarships to be had. So I got a job as a technician with a Philadelphia electronics company and learned a little about oscilloscopes and amplifiers.
When I was twenty toy mother died-quickly, of pneumonia. I inherited the grand-net-total of $453.86, after her medical and funeral expenses. And I was alone in the world: I didn't know where my father and sister were, and didn't really care. They were dream-creatures to me, without any solidity or existence.
I sold most of the furniture, put my mother's belongings into wooden crates, and moved into a one-room flat near the place where I worked. Two years went by and then I got drafted. The Army heard I had technical skills, and sent me to a training school and the result was I came out knowing a hell of a lot more about electronics than when I went in. Even though I hadn't been to college I could hold my own with plenty of engineers. All I needed were some evening courses in theory and I'd be able to get a good job making an engineer's salary which is in five figures instead of a technician's salary which is in four figures and not very good ones.
I got out of the army when I was twenty-four. I was six feet one, weighed one-eighty-five, was footloose and fancy free. For a couple of months I took it easy, getting back to civilian life. Then I began to think solidly about what I was going to do with myself. I wanted to go into electronics.
Okay.
But Philadelphia wasn't the place to do it. I wanted to head for one of the really exciting parts of the country, where new labs were springing up to do government space work. I studied the electronics magazines and saw that a lot of these companies were in Texas and a lot of them were in California. Choosing between them was easy: I don't like Texans; I don't like southerners in general. I don't like the way they look; I don't like the way they talk; don't like the way they think; don't even like the kind of names they have. Imagine naming a man R. J., nothing else, just initials. Or names like Arlie Lee, or Billie Sol, or Bobby Gene. Uh-uh. So far as I was concerned, you could take Texas and stick it, cactus and all.
So I was California-bound to seek fame and fortune. Not the first young man to go west, either. I bought a one-way ticket, put the crates containing my mother's stuff into storage in a Philly warehouse, and hopped the jet for San Francisco. I left at noon-was in Frisco around one o'clock, local time. By half past three, after a couple of telephone calls, I had rented a one-room apartment for fifty bucks a month, including gas and light. By four o'clock, I had an appointment for a job interview the following morning at a company called Magnetic Controls, Inc., which I had picked out as a go-getting new firm.
Things were taking shape.
How did I spend my first night in San Francisco? I spent it at the movies. I walked down to Market Street and saw a double bill of sex movies, something from Finland in which girls kept going for moonlight swims, and something made right here in the U.S.A. starring a lot of Hollywood strippers. I came out of that movie feeling as worked up as that night about ten years before when Janie had let me look but not touch. Outside the theater, a fag sailor tried to pick me up, but I wasn't quite that much worked up.
I went home to my lonely little apartment and leafed through an electronics magazine, to brush up in case they asked me tough questions the next day. Then I turned out the light and went to sleep. It was only ten o'clock, local time, but I was still living on Philadelphia time inwardly, and in Philly it was one in the morning. I wanted to be awake for my job interview.
I was up early the next morning. I studied a map, found out how to get to the office of Magnetic Controls, which was a little bit outside the city to the south, not very far from the airport, and I took a bus out. It was a smallish place, a bunch of green two-story buildings behind a low fence. It looked clean and neat, though-a good place to work. A guard at the gate looked at me and I said, "I'm looking for the Personnel Director."
"Right over there, Building A."
I followed where he pointed, and went in for my job interview.
Now you have almost all of the background information you need to understand how I got into the fix I got into-all but one item. And here the long arm of coincidence enters the picture. The whole thing may seem pretty improbable to you. Believe me, it seemed probable to me, too. I bet it seemed improbable to Oedipus when they told him that the old guy he had killed on the road was his father, and that the dame he had married was his mother.
The first person I saw in the personnel office was a girl, a very pretty girl. She had very dark hair, jet-black with a nice sheen. Full breasts pushed out the front of her white blouse. Her plaid skirt clung tightly to her hips and buttocks, and from the way I saw her buttocks moving under that skirt, I knew that she wasn't the type who wore girdles. She was slim except where she wasn't, and she wasn't slim in all the right places.
She gave me a dazzling smile. "Good morning."
"Hello," I said, thrown off balance by the beauty of her. In my state of horniness I was easily thrown off balance that way. "I'm James Collins. I have an interview with Mr. Donatelli for half past nine."
She looked down her list. "Yes, that's right. He'll see you in a moment. I'm his secretary, Lisa Andrews. Won't you have a seat?"
I had a seat. And I watched her seat. She moved about the outer office prettily, gracefully. Things began to happen to my blood pressure. I wanted desperately to talk to her, to start angling for a date. But I kept quiet. I figured this might be part of the interview, a subtle way of seeing what kind of guy I was. Maybe they didn't want the sort of guy who made passes at secretaries five minutes after he stepped through the door.
In a little while Donatelli buzzed for me, and I went into his office. He was young, maybe 32, and crisp-looking, but friendly. We talked for a while, and he asked me some questions about my background, then threw some quick technical questions at me. I fielded them neatly enough, so he hired me. I would begin at $108.59 a week with semi-annual raises, and for the first six months I would have ten hours a week on-the-job training while drawing full pay. He shook my hand, welcomed me aboard.
I went outside. Miss Andrews smiled again and said, "You'll like it here, Mr. Collins."
"I'm sure I will."
"Here's a booklet outlining employee fringe benefits, pension plans, and such. The management here is quite liberal, you'll find."
She looked me over, giving me the eye. I gave her the same. Already, we were drawn toward each other. And who was she? Three guesses, and the first two "don't count.
Sure. Lisa Andrews was Lisa Collins. My sister. And I had fallen for her, all unknown. The mills of the Gods were beginning to turn, and soon would grind us both exceedingly fine.
CHAPTER TWO
I didn't see her again foe more than a week. I didn't have the chance, and I didn't have the time. I didn't have the chance because the part of the plant where I worked was nowhere near the personnel office. I didn't have the time because I was busy breaking into a new job and a new life in a new city Under other circumstances, I could have made the chance. But I figured that Miss Andrews would keep for a little while longer. I would get around to her once I was organized.
The job turned out to be tougher than I expected. Magnetic Controls Inc., was in the thick of the latest scientific research, and even the college boys in the lab were hard put to understand what they were doing most of the time. I was completely baffled. But no one was rushing me. Two hours a day I got patient instruction from one of the top men in the lab, and the rest of the time I did shop work that made me feel useful and gave me a sense of what was going on. I could see that it would be a few months before I really phased into the operation, but the company was determined to give me every break.
In the personal department, things got going a lot faster. I made friends with a couple of guys in the shop named Mike Kearns and Dick Lewicki; and they showed me around the city the first weekend and got me organized that way. Then I dropped into Your Friendly Bank of America Office, swung a loan, and put down $200 for a 1955 Chevrolet in fair-to-middling condition. It needed some work, but I didn't mind. Kearns and I spent two evenings on it and got it to run as good as new.
Then there was the matter of sex.
Every red-blooded American boy needs somebody to go to bed with more or less frequently. I firmly believe that and always will. Here I was a stranger in a strange town, and I needed some companionship.
I found it-fast. I have good luck that way.
I found it right in my own rooming house.
Her name was Ronnie. I know, Ronnie is a guy's name, and I guess she was christened Veronica. She never explained. Ronnie it was. She lived one floor down, right below me. She was on the third floor, I was on the fourth.
The first couple of days I lived there, I saw her coming and going, I smiled, she smiled back, and that was that. She looked a little older than me-maybe 27 or 28-and she had a faintly weatherbeaten look about her. But she was still good looking. Her hair was a soft red, and she kept it cut short, kind of boyishly. Her cheekbones were sharp, her eyes dark and keen. Stick a feather in her hair and she could have passed for a Cherokee, if they have red-headed Cherokees, which I doubt. She was tall, around five feet ten, and dressed informally, usually in a pair of faded blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the tails hanging out.
I wondered vaguely about making a pass at her. But for the first few days, I was too busy with the job and with the after-hours studying I had to do and with fixing up the car. Besides, I was still daydreaming a little about Lisa. So Ronnie finally came to me.
It was my fifth night in San Francisco. It was mid-June, and the weather was cool and foggy, with chilly winds blowing in off the bay. I had come home around six that night and I had taken a shower. I was just about to go out to the pizza joint on the corner for my dinner when somebody knocked on my door.
Ronnie.
She was wearing her flannel shirt and her blue jeans, and she looked rumpled and seedy. She grinned at me and said, "Hi. I'm Ronnie Walker. From the floor below you."
"Jim Collins," I said. "Glad to know you, Ronnie."
"Figured I'd come around and be neighborly. Been a long time since anyone my age moved into the building, and I figured I'd drop up and introduce myself. You mind?"
"Not at all. I was figuring on getting to know you pretty soon anyway."
I knew what she meant about people her age in the building. I had moved into a nest of Senior Citizens. The average age of the residents in the fleatrap must have been close to 80.
She said, "You have dinner yet?"
"I was just going out."
"Don't. Come on down to my place. I'fe got some spaghetti up."
"Well-"
"Come on," she said. "Don't be bashful." I went down. Her room was just like mine, except that she had installed a hot-plate in one corner, and there was a two-by-three refrigerator in another. She was all set for cooking in.
The room was full of guitars and banjos. And books. And crafty things like a Navajo blanket and some Indian pottery and a lot of woven straw knickknacks. She opened a can of soup, put some spaghetti up to boil, and said to me, "What do you do, Jim?"
"I'm in electronics. Technician for Magnetic Controls. You?"
"I'm a folksinger."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning that I sing folksongs, silly. At night clubs and parties. It's a living."
"I never heard you singing from upstairs."
"I never sing except for pay," she said. "I'm bored, sick of singing. Especially folksongs. I feel like vomiting when I sing all about the downtrodden working man ( and the joy of joining the union."
"Then why don't you quit it?"
"It's a Irving," she said.
She cooked a pretty fair meal, and opened a gallon flask of Chianti to go with it. Then after dinner she broke her own rule first thing, and sang without pay. Only not folksongs-she sang dirty songs. The kind of stuff teenage boys sing when no adults are around. She didn't blush: she looked me straight in the eye, and she reeled off more four-letter words than I ever heard in the army. Her voice was plain and level, and very deep, almost a baritone. It was an amazing performance, a really blistering bunch of songs. "You like them?" she said. "That's great. That the kind of stuff you sing in your night clubs?"
"I wish. They'd toss me in the jug so fast if I did. You want to hear one of my night club songs?"
"If you feel like singing."
"I'll give you a sample."
She sang a song about the railroads, full of blood and gore and the struggling workingman. I'm not very interested in unions and all that jazz, but I liked the way she sang. I told her so.
She shrugged. "The public eats it up. The fat louses who come to the night clubs on the expense accounts love that kind of song. There they sit, worrying about the Dow-Jones Average, and they identify themselves with a lot of socialist labor organizers. I'm sick of it. But it's a living." She put down the guitar. "There's some more wine. Let's kill it before it goes bad."
We killed the wine, and then we settled down on her bed for a little serious wrestling. She was straightforward enough and I didn't have any doubts I would get some action out of her tonight. I didn't doubt it after she sang those dirty songs. She struck me as the type of girl who honestly liked sex and who had long since outgrown all the jazz about being coy and refusing her favors.
I was right.
She let me fool around with her for a little while, and then I got her clothes off. I peeled back the flannel shirt and got it off her, and then the blue jeans. And I made two interesting discoveries.
Discovery number one was that she didn't believe in underwear.
Discovery number two was that she had one hell of a spectacular body.
I hadn't suspected the second, though it had something to do with the first. I had figured she was kind of flat-chested, as a matter-of-fact. But that was simply because she didn't wear a bra and did wear loose untucked shirts. So her breasts just sat there on her chest without being outlined by her clothing.
I took the shirt off, though, and there were these two big, round, taut globes of good honest meat, high and firm and close together, with little dark nipples standing up hard and tall. My eyes widened as I saw those two fantastic breasts, and she grinned at me as though to say, "Surprise, surprise!" And then when the jeans came off I saw the rest of the body, and I wondered why in hell she hid it under such unglamorous clothing.
She was long and lush, and lean, with those breasts sticking out of her like swollen grapefruits, and two heavy buttocks that neatly filled my hands-one cheek to one hand-and solid thighs and tapering calves and all the other goodies. I stood up and looked at her.
"Something wrong?" she asked.
"Nope. Not at all."
"You look like you never saw a naked girl before. You knew I was a girl, didn't you? You aren't surprised that I don't have a-"
"I'm just looking," I said. "Jesus, you're easy on the eyes. I never expected-"
I stopped.
She read my mind and finished the sentence for me. "You never expected a girl who looked like such a slob to have such a body, huh?"
Color crept into my face. "Well, with that floppy shirt of yours, how was I to know you had a figure like that?"
"It's a camouflage," she said. "Keeps the wrong people away. Now stop staring at me and get your clothes off, buster."
I duly got my clothes off. That's a command I never need to hear twice from any girl. She looked me over and approved what she saw, and then reached out and drew me down on the bed.
What with moving and all, it had been a long time since I had done this.
Too long.
Her hands touched me and I was on fire. I panted and snorted and Ronnie laughed, and waited for me, and without wasting much time on preliminaries I took her. It was okay, though. She wasn't the kind of girl who needed to be teased for an hour and a half first. She was ready for me, and I glided easily into that wonderful harbor, and she angled up to accept me and began to move her hips in a slow, undulating motion that drove me wild.
It was great.
Great for me, great for her. We gave the bedsprings a good workout. The bed was a light one and hopped all over the floor. I slipped my hands underneath her body, cupping her buttocks, and lifted her and she arched her back; and I went deep, deep, and it was tremendous; and Ronnie was gasping, and I was gasping and her big breasts were going jounce-jounce-jounce with every thrust of my body and every push of hers; and sweat oiled our bodies and there came a moment when she grinned at me and said in a husky little voice, "I'm going to-"
And she didn't finish the sentence, because the next second she got there. With a real explosion. The bed heaved and the floor complained and I saw stars, and we slammed around for a long time and came crashing back down to earth together in one simultaneous, dizzy drop.
It was pretty tremendous.
After it was over, we curled up for a while on the bed, and I kissed her breasts and she stroked my arms, and then she said, "Pass me the cigs, will you?"
"Sure thing."
I found her pack lying on the floor. I handed them to her, and we lit up. We puffed away for a while without saying much. Words get pretty useless when two people who go to bed together for the first time make a success of it. What were we supposed to do, congratulate each other on the high quality of our sexual abilities?
Don't be silly. So we just sat there.
Then she stubbed her cigarette out half-smoked and picked up one of the guitars.
"I'm going to sing," she said.
She played, instead: sad, haunting melodies, very soft, very delicate. She sat crosslegged and naked on the floor, cradling the guitar on her firm thighs and leaning forward to pluck the strings, her big boobs swaying gently as she moved rhythmically. She played for about half an hour without saying a word, and I sat on the bed smoking and listening to her, enjoying the music and fascinated by the snake-like weaving motions of her naked body as she played. Finally she put her hands on the strings to quiet them and looked up at me. "You like that kind of music, Jim?"
"It's beautiful. What is it?"
"Elizabethan lute music. Composers like Dowland and Morley. There are songs to go with them, but the music is beautiful all by itself. It's the kind of music I really like to play."
"You ever perform it?"
"Never."
"Why not?"
"Nobody wants to hear it except in the little coffeehouses. I don't want to make that scene. I'd rather earn my bread singing Sam Hall and play Morley for my own pleasure."
"You could give a concert," I said. "People would pay to hear you play like that."
She shook her head. "It wouldn't go over. Anyway, I'm not sure I want to try. I like to keep this stuff all to myself."
"You played it for me," I pointed out "That's different"
She put the guitar down and stretched out full length on the floor.
"Come here," she said.
I went to her. She was a big girl, and I went down to her and she gobbled me up. For the second time that night our bodies joined and we went through the routine of love-and for the second time everything worked out with beautiful timing and neither of us had any complaints.
Around eleven that night I put my clothes on and left. Ronnie, still naked, walked me to the door, and I smiled at her and put my hands on her big round breasts, and squeezed them for a moment, and then left.
A strange girl, I thought.
But great in the hay.
I figured I was set up-for a while, at least. I had a perfect shack-job. She lived ten seconds away via staircase, was a good cook, played the guitar well, and had enough independence so I wouldn't have to worry about getting involved in anything. It was ideal: at no cost, or at least very little, I would get sex, food, and music.
Very neat. But it didn't work out quite that way, because Ronnie had a little too much independence.
You would think that after two sensational slam-bang rounds in the sack, a certain bond would have formed, at least the beginning of a kinship, know what I mean? But it didn't. The next evening, I got home at half past six, and Ronnie was just going out, wearing her sloppy joes and carrying a guitar.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi there," she answered, and grinned at me, and kept on going. Not another word.
It was as though I was still Mr. Collins from upstairs, and not Jim who had slept with her the night before. She hadn't exactly cut me dead-she had simply gone back in time to our earlier status. I was baffled. Never before had I gone to bed with a girl one day, only to have her seem to forget all about it the next.
For the next couple of days, I couldn't even find her. I went down both evenings and knocked on her door, but got no answer. She was out performing, I figured. The third night, when I went down, heard voices inside, and went back to my own room.
The fourth night she was out again.
On the fifth, she came upstairs, got me, brought me down for dinner, and we went to bed all over again. Not a word about what she had been doing all week.
A very strange girl, I was deciding.
A real weirdo.
It was getting very clear to me that I couldn't count on Ronnie for consistent sex and companionship. She just wasn't that kind of girl. She was a drifter, a floater; and she might choose to float my way a couple of days a week, then not float at all for a month. I preferred a steadier kind of relationship.
So I started looking around again.
All the trouble I later had would have been avoided if Ronnie had shown more interest in me. I would have spent all my time with her, would have comfortably nestled on those sweet melon-like breasts, and would have gotten all the comforting I needed. But since Ronnie was so undependable, I started looking in other directions.
Lisa's direction.
Lisa Andrews, I thought of her as, then. It was now about ten days since I had gone to work at Magnetic Controls, and I hadn't set eyes on her in all that time. But this day I made it my business to head over to Personnel at the start of my lunch hour, hoping that like most of the clerical staff Miss Andrews ate from one to two, not from twelve to one the way I did.
I was right. She was in her office.
She flashed the brilliant grin at me and then looked a little doubtful, and said, "Collins, isn't it? James Collins."
"Make it Jim," I said. "You've got quite a memory, haven't you?"
"It's what I'm paid for," she said. "Among other things. Can I help you, Jim? Mr. Donatelli's out, but maybe I-"
"Yes, maybe you. I just came for a visit."
"To visit me?"
"To visit you." I scanned her fingers. No wedding rings, no engagement rings, no rings of any kind. Still hope. "You have a minute?" I asked.
"Sure. Something about the job troubling you?"
"No, the job's great"
"What is it, then?"
I looked her straight in those black, sparkling eyes and grinned. "I think you're beautiful," I said.
I waited for the reaction. Some women might laugh and tell me not to soft-soap them, other women might get annoyed and send me parking.
Lisa smiled softly and said, "Really?"
"Really."
"Okay, so you think I'm beautiful. That's very sweet of you," she said playfully. "Do you have any other compliments?"
"None that would be really proper just yet," I said. "But I have a question."
"Question away."
"Are you busy tonight."
"Yes."
"Busy-busy? Can't be broken?"
"No."
I sighed. "Tomorrow night?"
"I'm free," she said.
"Care to have dinner with a lowly technician? Take in a movie, maybe?"
Her eyes held dancing flecks of fire. Her breasts were rising and falling steadily under her white silk blouse. She was beautiful, all right-almost painful to look at. I was drawn to her with a force I couldn't resist. And, though I didn't know it yet, she was drawn to me by the same force. They say opposites attract, likes repel, but it isn't always true. Here we were, brother and sister, though not knowing it. As alike biologically as two people can be.
And we were attracted.
Strongly.
Her lips turned up in a warm smile and she said, "Okay, Jim. It's a date."
CHAPTER THREE
I didn't score on our first date. I tell you that right now to save you the trouble of wondering about it-Lisa wasn't that kind of girl. She was no puritan, I found out in a hurry, but she wasn't a slut either. She believed in a certain orderly procession of things. If a girl liked a guy, she gave him one step at a time, and watched how he behaved, and if she still liked him on the next-to-last step, she went all the way. That was Lisa's philosophy.
I thought it was a pretty healthy philosophy. It's tough on a girl's self-respect if she puts out on the first time a guy asks her, and tough on everybody if she never comes across. Lisa believed in a happy medium. Of course, I didn't know any of these things as I set out in my newly-Simonized Chevy for Lisa's place on the evening of our date. I got there around half past six. She lived a good distance from me, on one of the hilly streets out almost at Golden Gate Park. It was a long bus-ride home for her every day from the laboratory.
It was a street of narrow, pastel-painted frame houses. There were hardly any cars parked on it, so I pulled up at the curb and got out, right in front of the house with the number Lisa had given me.
I rang the bell.
A dowdy, pudgy woman of about fifty answered and beamed pleasantly at me. "Are you Jim?" she asked.
"That's right," I said, and found myself adding a humble "Ma'am."
"Lisa will be right down," she said. "Would you like to come in and wait?"
"That would be swell," I said in the same folksy tone.
She led me into a kind of sitting-room and I sat. A moment later, Lisa appeared, coming downstairs in a flounce of skirt and petticoat.
She looked radiant.
She wasn't wearing anything fancy, just a neat dress, and she had combed her hair and washed her face. But there was a glitter about her, a sheen of beauty, and as I studied the perfection of her face, the trim little nose and the strong chin and the smooth cheeks and the full lips, I felt a pang of something very much like love.
"Been waiting long?" she asked.
"Two sees. The car's right outside."
"Where are we going?"
"Omar Khayyam's," I said. "Ever been there?"
"No," she said. "But I've heard so much about it!"
She looked impressed. Dick Lewicki had tipped me off to Omar Khayyam's. It's a downtown restaurant, Armenian or Turkish, very much favored by tourists, and one of the best restaurants in the city as well as one of the most colorful. Lewicki thought it was an ideal place to take a girl on a first date, and even lent me ten bucks to see me through the evening. I might add that everybody in the shop was fascinated with the idea of my dating Lisa Andrews. Evidently she was very popular among the company's top brass, and no mere technician had ever gotten to first base with her.
As we got into the car, I said, "Was that your mother?"
"Oh, Lord, no. That was the landlady, Mrs. Thomas.
She's very sweet, isn't she? I rent two rooms upstairs from her. She's quite reasonable."
"You're all alone in the world, then?"
She shook her head. "My father lives across the Bay in Oakland. I don't see him much. And I never knew my mother. They were divorced when I was a baby."
"Same in my family," I said. "It's a lonely life in a broken home."
At this point you're probably wondering why I didn't turn to her and tell her I was her brother. After all, it seems so obvious, especially since I gave you all the facts a little while ago. Things are always obvious when you have the facts. It should have hit me right in the eye, shouldn't it? Here was this girl Lisa-same name as my sister-and she was the right age and her parents had split up when she was a kid and she had been raised by her father. Of course she was my sister!
Of course. But you have to realize that I hadn't thought about that sister, or about my father, in maybe ten years. They weren't in the front of my mind at all. It didn't even occur to me that this girl's name was the same as my sister's. You know, when you move 3000 miles, you don't expect the second girl you meet to be your long-lost sister. The thought never crossed my mind. We let the subject of parents drop. We talked about trivial things instead-the San Francisco Giants and their pennant chances, the weather in Frisco, the new contract our company had just landed. Then we reached the restaurant, I turned the car over to the doorman, and we went inside.
It was crowded, but they took us right to our table, and we had a fabulous meal. I didn't have a hell of a lot of experience ordering things in fancy restaurants, but I think I bluffed pretty well. As for Lisa, she handled herself with a poise and confidence that told me she had been in plenty of places like this before, maybe even this one half a dozen times. The idea depressed me a little. I could picture her hobnobbing with the smooth-talking expense-account boys who ran the company, a bunch of youngish sharpies who made more money in a year than I had in my whole life so far. I felt a little out of my depth competing. But so far Lisa didn't give any indication that I wasn't matching up.
Dinner set me back a little more than I was expecting, but I rode with the blow. What the hell, I thought, call it an investment against future returns.
We stepped out into the cool June evening and Lisa said, "That was a wonderful meal, Jim. It was a great idea coming here."
I beamed and slipped my hand into hers.
Going to the movies seemed a somehow impersonal and cold thing to do, now. So we went dancing instead. We went to one of the big hotels and glided back and forth over the floor for a couple of hours, and soon we were cheek to cheek. Her cheek was so soft, so cool, so sweet. Her ear was against my lips and I took a little nibble of her earlobe and she giggled. As we danced I felt the firm rounds of her breasts against me and her thighs moving like pistons and I began to tingle all over.
Then it was eleven o'clock, and tomorrow was a working day-it was time to head back to her place.
And I began to wonder about how the evening would end.
Would she invite me up to her rooms? Mrs. Thomas might not like that. Lisa might not even want to. Should I push the issue? Should I make a play?
I decided not to. Considering that she lived in rented rooms, I wasn't going to score except at my place or in the car-and neither of those situations was going to come to pass tonight. And I was afraid of spoiling everything by looking too eager at the start. I could tell I had made an impression. And the clinging, languorous way she had danced against me told me that this was no frigid virgin: she knew the needs of the body. Sooner or later she would let me gratify them for her-no sense rushing things.
So I parked in front of the house and we got out and went into the darkened vestibule. And then she turned to me in the darkness and my arms went out to her and hers to me and our bodies came together for our first kiss.
It was a passionate one. She kissed me with her lips and with her tongue, with her breasts and thighs. She put her body right up against mine, and I moved forward, letting her know that I needed her but could wait. Her tongue met mine, then slipped deep into my mouth, playfully withdrew, and I followed it into hers. Our bodies were tight. I was almost dizzy with the sweet perfume of her.
Then the embrace broke and her eyes were sparkling into mine and she was smiling, and she whispered, "Good night, Jim. It was a wonderful evening."
"And there'll be a lot of other wonderful evenings to come, I hope."
"I hope," she said.
She smiled again, a warm, inviting smile, and then she was gone. I practically floated out the door and down to my car. I was in love, I knew.
And she was in love with me.
I started the car, then looked up at the house. A light was on, on the second floor. The blinds were drawn, but I saw a shadow moving around behind them; and as Lisa got between the lamp and the blinds, I saw her profile, her breasts sharply exaggerated by a trick of the light, and I knew she was naked up there already. A cold sweat came over me and I gripped the wheel hard. It was almost like nausea. I wanted her so much I felt like crying. The image of her burned in my imagination: I saw high, pointed breasts and a slim belly and full, tender buttocks and-
I bit my lip. I was sick and light-headed with desire for her.
The only thing that kept me from going out of my mind altogether was the knowledge that before very much longer I was going to get her.
The next day was Thursday. I carefully stayed away from the Personnel Department all day. I didn't want Lisa to get the idea I was haunting her, that I regarded her in any way as my property, to be checked up on at least once a day. Believe me, it was a struggle. I wanted to go over and just look at her, feast my eyes.
But I stayed away.
That night was a long one. I was keyed up and edgy, and I didn't have any plans. I half-hoped Ronnie would be available, but I half-hoped she wouldn't; because my mind was full of Lisa and it seemed almost like infidelity to sleep with someone else. By nine o'clock Ronnie didn't show. By nine o'clock I was biting my nails from tension.
I went downstairs.
I stood outside Ronnie's door.
I started to knock. Then, before touching my knuckles down, I stopped to listen. I heard Ronnie's voice, unmistakably Ronnie's voice.
"Oh, yes," she was purring. "Yes, do that again. Don't stop ... please don't stop...."
And a sound of creaking bedsprings.
My face flamed. I felt like a peeping torn just to have overheard her sounds of passion. I got the hell back upstairs in a hurry.
But it was a long night.
Lunchtime the next day, I dropped over to Personnel to see Lisa and try to set up our next date. She gave me a big hello, and in short order I learned that she was free on Saturday-how had that happened?-and that she'd love to see me again. We talked a little bit about what we would do, and she said, "Have you ever been to Muir Woods?"
"What's that?"
"It's a grove of redwood trees on the other side of the bay in Marin County. One of the most beautiful places on earth. Let's spend the afternoon there. Then we can figure out what to do in the evening."
It sounded great to me. I sensed a promise in her words, and that night I was so excited I could hardly sleep. I felt like a kid again, on the eve of his first big date; and in a sense that's what this was, because I had never known a girl who had meant this much to me before.
I pulled up outside her place at noon sharp the next day and honked my horn. Lisa appeared almost immediately. She was a glorious sight. She wore a man's white blouse with the shirt-tails tied under her breasts to expose flat, smooth, tawny belly, and a pair of turquoise pedal-pushers that outlined the contours of her hips, thighs, and buttocks in a way that left me trembling. From her right hand dangled the picnic basket she had promised to pack. She grinned at me and plopped down next to me in the car.
"Hi," she said. She extended her neck like a turtle coming out of its shell, and I made the right guess and kissed her. It wasn't a sizzling kiss like our goodnight on Wednesday, just a cheery hello from a guy to his gal as they set out for a happy Saturday of picnicking.
Not that the day looked too promising-it was dark and cloudy and gloomy-but as we got on the Golden Gate Bridge and the sun appeared, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw clouds behind me, and I realized that a great, gray raincloud hangs over San Francisco all the time, but not over the suburbs.
Sure enough, by the time we crossed the bay the sun was bright and gay, and the temperature had risen from the high fifties to the low seventies-and the whole atmosphere had changed.
Lisa directed me to the park. I drove on and on, and the road narrowed. Then we started to climb up a mountain road that went from one wild turn to another, and all the time huge tour buses would come slamming around the bends from the other direction, roaring past. I began to wonder if we would ever get to Muir Woods alive.
But we did.
And it was worth the trip.
After all the climbing we had done, we were back down in a valley-low, moist, and cool. And there were the trees. I had been hearing about redwood trees all my life, but I had never really imagined what they were like. If you're an Easterner, your mind can't grasp the idea of a tree as tall as a 30-story skyscraper. But there they were, tall and narrow, their heads poking into the clouds. I stood under them and looked up and goggled. The park was like a cathedral, hushed and dark, with these huge columns rising sky-high every few feet.
In one way they were disappointing, though. "I thought they were bigger at the base," I said. "It doesn't look like you could drive a car through one of these. They're big, but not all that big."
"You're right," Lisa said. "It's the other kind of redwood that gets thick at the base-the Gigantea, it's called. This is the Sempervirens. They grow taller than the other kind, but not as thick."
"You sound like an expert."
"Everybody in California knows all about the redwoods," she said.
"Do they have some of the other kind here?" I asked.
She shook her head. "You've got to go inland for them. These tall ones, they grow along the coast, where it's cool and rainy. You find the big ones at Yosemite Park, for instance. That's where they have the tree you can drive through."
"Have you seen them?"
"A couple of years ago."
"What are they like?"
"Big," she said. "Big as a house. You've got to see them to believe them."
"Maybe some weekend we can drive down there and have a look," I said hopefully. "I've never been to any of the national parks."
"I'd love to go with you," she said.
So already we were setting up weekend trips. Progress was being made, I told myself.
Hand in hand, we wandered through the redwood grove. It went on quite a way. The grove was fairly crowded with tourists who had come in the buses, mostly old women from Iowa and little boys and girls from New York; but as Lisa and I walked on, we soon began getting away from the populace. In a few minutes we were completely alone, a couple of miles into the park, not another human being in sight.
"We can have our picnic here," she said. "Maybe it's against the rules, but we're so far away they'll never find us. We just have to be careful not to make a mess."
"Uh-huh," I said.
I walked over and had a look at a bubbling brook that ran nearby. Then I came back. Lisa was leaning against one of the redwoods, and I went to her and pressed against her, flattening her against the tree. She giggled. The cool moist smell of the forest floor was in my nostrils. Evergreen needles and cones crunched gently underfoot. I put my arms around her and she gave me her lips.
Our kiss was like the first one, only more so. She pressed tight against me, moving her body from side to side urgently, and her loins ground against mine, maddening me. Still I kept my head. We were alone in the forest and it wouldn't have been too hard for me to get her pedal-pushers off and have her right there. I didn't want to, though. It was picturesque, yes, but I didn't want our first lovemaking to be spoiled by some cluck of a schoolteacher from the corn belt coming upon us, or two goggling kids, or a park trooper. And I didn't want Lisa to lie there getting redwood needles in the pink, tender flesh of those buttocks that I hadn't even seen yet.
So I fought back the temptation to try to have her on the spot. Instead, I cautiously worked my hand up between our bodies and cupped it over her breast. She didn't push me away. I felt the fabric of her bra, but it was nothing but a cloth cup-no padding, no boning to provide support, because no support was needed. I could feel the ripe, full, firm globe of flesh inside. I held it for a long moment, and ran my other hand over her shoulder blades, then down to the strip of bare, velvet-smooth flesh at her midriff, and then to her buttocks.
We were both panting when we broke apart.
There was a smoky look of lust in her eyes, and I knew beyond a doubt that she wanted me every bit as much as I wanted her.
But we were going to wait. Waiting would make it all the better when it finally happened.
We sat down calmly on the banks of the little stream and had our picnic lunch. Lisa had done a good job. The basket contained chicken salad sandwiches and sliced egg sandwiches and salami sandwiches and apples and pears and plums and a thermos bottle of lemonade and all kinds of other things. We couldn't even begin to finish it all.
"What kind of appetite did you think I had?" I asked.
"I didn't know. I figured better too much than too little. You're a man, a big man. I didn't want to starve you."
"We could camp out all weekend on this stuff."
"Maybe we will." she said.
She was only joking, of course. But the hint in her voice made me tingle.
When we had finally given up, we carefully repacked the picnic box, then gathered up all the rubbish and put it in a bag she had brought along. Then we walked ahead a little way into the woods again.
And we kissed again.
And I held both her breasts in my hands. My eager fingers opened her blouse, she herself loosened her bra, and I slipped my hands in. I still couldn't actually see her bare breasts, but I held them. They were firm and cool to the touch, except for the nipples, which were hard and hot. Her breasts filled my hands. I have big hands.
She was flushed and excited when we came up from our kiss. Gently, she took my hands from her breasts, and with a kind of delicate modesty turned her back to adjust her bra and blouse.
"We'd better start back," she said. "It's getting late. We wouldn't want to be stranded here when it gets dark."
"I could think of worse fates."
"I could think of more comfortable places to be stranded," she said.
We started back. My nerves were drumming. I figured it was now about 70-30 that I would score tonight, and the thought almost frightened me. I wanted it to be good. I wanted it to be perfect, the best she had ever had. I was certain she had had it before, but I wanted tonight to obliterate all of her memories of other lovers.
And suppose it didn't happen?
I would crack up, I figured. If I didn't make her tonight, I would go blooey. Either that or sit outside Ronnie's door until she came homeland take out on Ronnie's willing body the lusts Lisa had inspired.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when we reached the entrance to the park. We dropped our trash in the trash basket, took a last look at the towering redwood trees, and got into the car. Then it was back, up the winding road, down the other side, and through the sunny suburbs back to foggy Frisco.
As we crossed the bridge, Lisa said to me, "Have you been to Fisherman's Wharf yet?"
"No."
"You like seafood?"
"Yes."
So we went to Fisherman's Wharf. I parked the car near the cable-car turntable and we walked down to the water front. It was about five o'clock. Despite our big lunch we were hungry again, and I bought her a shrimp cocktail at a sidewalk stand and had one myself. The shrimps weren't the kind I was used to: they were tiny, and you got about half a million of them in your dish. Then we walked on, and I bought her a funny hat at one of the souvenir stands, and we watched the fishing boats being unloaded, and then, around six, we went into one of the restaurants and had a lobster apiece.
And then suddenly it was nighttime.
We came out and walked hand in hand back up the steep hill to the car. Lisa said, "What would you like to do next?"
"I don't know. What would you like to do?"
"Whatever you'd like to do," she said, tossing the ball back to me.
I grabbed it and grimly decided to run with it. My heart pounding, I said, "I don't know. How about coming up to my place for a while?"
The die was cast.
Lisa looked me straight in the eye.
"I'd love to," she said. "Let's go!" And I knew beyond a doubt that tonight was the night I would have her for the first time.
CHAPTER FOUR
Taking a leaf from Ronnie's book, I stopped in a Market Street liquor emporium and got a gallon jug of good red wine, and then we continued on to my humble abode. I was damned glad that I had tidied the place up a little that morning, in half-expectation of something like this happening.
We got there a little before nine. As we went in, I had a kind of waking nightmare: Ronnie would choose tonight to come visiting. But I brushed the idea away. Ronnie always performed on Saturday nights-she wouldn't be home till two or three in the morning, and by that time it wouldn't matter if she came around. "Enter, Princess," I said.
Lisa stepped in, looked around, smiled. "It's nice," she said. "Small, but it's clean and cozy. I like it."
"I hoped you would. But it isn't always that neat. I fixed it up this morning."
"Because you knew I was coming?" she said mischievously.
"Because I was hoping you would," I said.
She kicked off her shoes and started wandering around the room, looking at the books, mostly electronics handbooks. Without her shoes she was maybe five feet four or five, and she looked small-boned and delicate. I came up behind her, put my hands lightly over each of her breasts, and kissed the smooth column of her throat.
"How about some wine?" I asked. "Love some."
"Coming right up."
I wrestled the cork out of the jug and poured a glass for each of us. Then we squatted down crosslegged in the middle of the floor and grinned at each other and clinked glasses.
"To-to us," I said.
I put the wine to my lips. It was dry and almost bitter, but I liked it. So did Lisa. She finished her glass off ahead of me, beating me by about eight seconds, and I poured refills.
I turned the radio on low. I had bought a cheap FM set and now I tuned it in to one of the Berkeley good-music stations. Plinking sounds came out, and at first I thought it was a guitar, and I was reminded of Ronnie sitting cross-legged and naked, her breasts swaying as she coaxed 17th-century melodies out of her guitar. But I soon realized it was a harpsichord.
"I love Bach," Lisa said. She was leaning back against me, her head in my lap, and her voice was dreamy. "Half the records I own are Bach. I think he's wonderful."
"A little too deep for me," I confessed. "I'm kind of simple about music."
"Just listen," she said. "Follow the lines of the music. It's as beautiful as-as an equation. As beautiful as a schematic. Simple and yet complex-"
I listened. While I listened I sipped wine and stroked Lisa's jet-black hair, and told myself that I was falling in love for the very first time, that all the other girls had just been preludes to this. After a while I reached down and unbuttoned the top button of Lisa's blouse, then the next button, then the last one.
The blouse drooped open. The white cones of her bra showed through. I ran my fingertips lightly over the upper curves of her breasts, visible above the bra.
She half-turned to me. "I'll have some more wine," she said.
Then I unsnapped her bra.
This time, when it fell away from her breasts, she let me remove it altogether, along with her blouse. She wore only the tight pedal-pushers now.
The sight of her, naked above the waist, hit me like a bolt of lightning. She was gorgeous. She was terrific. She was a symphony in flesh. Old Bach could have written something great with her as inspiration.
Her breasts weren't mammoths, like Ronnie's but they were of a good size, grapefruit-size. They were very firm and very round, and they sat high on her chest, beginning right under the clavicle and curving out tremendously. The nipples were small and pinkish, puckered at the tips, and standing up half an inch or so. Her skin was almost transparent: I could see the faint blue lines of veins running beneath the surface.
She leaned back against me, and I put my left hand over her left breast, covering the coral-colored tip a moment, then letting it protrude between my fingers. Her nipple was very hard. She stroked my arm gently as I cupped the fleshy mound.
Beautiful breasts. With a saucy tilt to them. I got so interested in her breasts I almost forgot to go on to the next step.
Never fear. I said I almost forgot.
We were halfway through our fourth glass of wine apiece when I went to work on the pedal-pushers. I was already tapering off on the booze, both for her and for me. I wanted to be sober enough to appreciate it, and I wanted her to be sober so I didn't have to think she had been too drunk to defend her virtue.
The pedal-pushers had a zipper on the side, and a button. I had trouble with the button. The pedal-pushers were so tight that there was no way for me to get my fingers on the button, and my coordination wasn't too swell after all that wine anyway.
Lisa helped me.
She reached down and flipped the button open herself. I felt a terrific surge of desire. It's one thing when a girl lies there and passively lets you undress her, but it's ten times as interesting when she makes some little gesture that shows she wants you to. Like flipping open a button on her pants.
With the button open, the zipper was no problem.
I drew it down, and then slipped my fingers into the waistband; List lifted her buttocks and started to wriggle, and I drew the pedal-pushers down over the swelling flare of her hips, and I realized her panties were coming too. I took them both down, and soon her thighs were coming into view and her knees and then she was gaily kicking pants and panties high into the air and they fell to earth I knew not where.
She was naked.
She was colossal.
She had the classic hourglass figure: wide shoulders and big breasts, then a breathtaking curve down to a wasp-waist, then an equally flabbergasting outcurve to ample hips. And then a flawless taper down thighs and calves to small-boned feet.
She was built-and how!
Lush boobs, firm satiny thighs, full buttocks with little dimples where they began to swell-she lay there smiling at me. She didn't pretend to be modest, not with every stitch of clothing off her. She was telling me frankly that she wanted me.
"Lisa?" I whispered, standing above her and looking down at her voluptuous nakedness.
"Mmm?"
"I want to tell you something before we begin."
"Mmmm?"
"I love you, Lisa."
She smiled up at me. "I love you," she whispered huskily.
The hell of it was that I meant it. Oh, sure, you're supposed to tell a girl you love her just before and even during your performance. It's expected. It's a kind of open-sesame, and many a girl won't come across unless the magic phrase is uttered. But that wasn't the case here. I didn't need to bribe Lisa with affection, and both of us knew it. It was just that-well-that I loved her, and wanted to tell her.
She rose to her knees and started to undress me. She unbuttoned my shirt, and I pulled it off. Then she tugged at my belt, and took off my pants and shorts in one swoop, the way I had done with her.
She was still kneeling in front of me, and I saw her looking at me in a way that I immediately understood. But she must have changed her mind, because she didn't do it. It was her innate tact again-she didn't want to begin our relationship with something so exotic, something that half the country still thinks is a criminal offense. That would come later on, when we were no longer strangers to each other's bodies.
I knelt next to her.
I kissed her breasts, taking the nipples into my mouth. I ran my fingers over her body as though giving homage to an idol. The room was silent but for the distant twanging of the harpsichord, and I felt almost as though some kind of religious ceremony was taking place.
Blasphemous? Maybe. I can't help how I feel.
And so I ran my hands over the skin of this absolute dream of a girl, this full-busted, taut-buttocked wench with the sparkling eyes, this lusty lass who happened to be the daughter of my mother and my father, though I couldn't have imagined such a thing.
My fingers trembled a little as I drew invisible circles on her satiny thighs and moved closer to the sanctuary. And got there, and found it ready and palpitating for me. And probed, and caressed.
Lisa shivered. "Jim-oh, I want you so much, Jim, so very much-"
I tried to hold back, tried to delay the consummation, but there was no checking the raging demons of desire that were rising high within me. This wasn't going to be one of those slow, lingering build-ups. It wouldn't have been human to wait.
Lisa knew what was going on inside me. Pretty much the same thing was going on inside her, too. Impatience ruled the day.
She took hold of me and guided me to the seat of warmth.
I pressed down on her, feeling the hard points of her breasts against my chest, and the softness of her belly against mine; and I made the age-old motion with my hips and she replied with the same; and easily and steadily I joined my body to hers, and the devil put together what should have been forever asunder; and inch by aching inch I took possession of my sister's body.
No bells rang. No lightning descended from heaven to smite us. No drums pounded. There was no smell of brimstone. Of course not-we knew not what we did. I was just a guy, and she was just a gal, and our bodies had cunningly been designed differently to allow for an interesting meshing of gears, and we were meshing. As was intended, on "high." At that moment we felt we were obeying the basic commandment of nature, rather than breaking the basic taboo of mankind.
And it was terrific.
Let me pass along one interesting fact about incest.
A brother and a sister are often anatomically and psychologically perfect for each other. It stands to reason. The same basic set of genes and chromosomes had formed us both. And so our bodies meshed perfectly, in the physical sense, and our temperaments coincided too.
We went up the ladder together, step by step.
Higher and higher.
Faster and faster.
I opened my eyes and looked down and saw Lisa's beautiful face twisted and distorted by the power of the sensations she was feeling, and then I was feeling some pretty powerful sensations myself, and I closed my eyes and clung tight to her. I cupped one breast for a moment, then caught a sensuous buttock, flattening both my hands out on the floor at her sides to support myself.
I lifted myself up, so that my chest just grazed the tips of her breasts, while keeping the action going below the waist. Lisa grinned and pulled me down again. Her lips encircled mine, her tongue rammed its way into my mouth-the taste of her was sweeter than any wine.
We couldn't keep the pace going much longer, though. I felt the fireworks starting to go off and I gritted my teeth and knotted every muscle in my body and held on for that critical second, and then Lisa cried out, a joyful cry, a loud "Oh!" of wonder and happiness, and her pleasure came up out of the south and overwhelmed her.
She turned to jelly while it was happening. Her body shook convulsively and she throbbed and quivered. I hung on tight.
Then came the slamming thrust of my own fulfillment.
Then we were lying limply, each of us in our own private world, and I was telling myself that this had been something absolutely unforgettable.
Our bodies were still joined. She smiled sleepily at me and said, "I love you, Jim."
"I love you. More than I could ever tell you."
"It was so good, Jim, so complete. I felt so safe in your arms, so warm, so secure-"
"It'll always be that way, Lisa. That's a guarantee."
"Jim?"
"Mmm?'
"Kiss my breasts again. I like it,"
"It'll be a pleasure."
All passion was spent, now, and there was nothing amorous in the way I leaned over and tenderly kissed each pink nipple. The nipples were soft and puckered now, which meant that she had been completely satisfied, at least for a moment. That was a good thing to know. Sometimes a woman can't hide the fact that she's still unsatisfied, even though she'd like to give the impression that she is. But Lisa didn't need to pretend. She had experienced a total fulfillment, and don't think I wasn't pleased as punch about it. How often does that happen the first time between a man and a woman, anyway?
But we were special, of course.
We had practically the same nervous system, practically the same body, with certain obvious differences. Only we didn't know that yet. So I ascribed our extra-special compatibility to pure good luck, and let it go at that.
After a long while we drew apart. I rose, smiled down at her. "Wine?"
"Please."
We were both fully sober. The searing intensity of our lovemaking had burned any alcohol right out of our systems. I poured a tall glass for her, one for myself. We grinned and sipped it.
Lisa got to her feet. Lithe and slim, a vision of pale nakedness, she walked to the window and looked out at the silent street. The taut globes of her buttocks grew taut as she bent forward.
I came up behind her.
"Happy?"
"Very."
"So am I," I said.
She turned and looked me levelly in the eye. "I want to get one thing clear. This wasn't my first time with a man."
I shrugged. "I didn't ask."
"I want to keep the record straight, Jim. I've slept with other men. I imagine you guessed that anyway. I don't seem inexperienced, do I?"
"Not really," I admitted. "But why bring the past up at all?"
"So I can tell you that all the other men are like shadows now. I can hardly remember what they were like, after tonight. It's never been-this good for me before, Jim. That's God's own truth."
"Nor for me," I said. I couldn't resist a smile of triumph. I had had my wish. I had obliterated all her past lovers. I had made this the night she lost her virginity all over again, in a way. And I was glad of that.
The reason all men want to marry virgins so badly-and make no mistake about it-is that they're afraid of comparison with those who have ploughed the same field before. I admit it freely. But here Lisa was telling me that the predecessors didn't compare with me.
And I believed her. I could see the truth in her eyes: she wasn't the kind of girl who would lie about anything, little or big.
I came up to her and took her breasts in my hands, and she snuggled against me. I was happy, the happiest ever. I was starting to see myself a married man, living in some nice suburban nook with Lisa, raising children who would have my muscles or her beauty, depending on their sex.
For certainly she was beautiful by any man's standards. Especially by my own, since when I looked at her I was seeing my own bone structure, my own features turned feminine. I'm immodest enough to believe what women are always telling me: that I'm handsome. And if I was handsome, then Lisa, with the same underlying face, had to be beautiful.
Why didn't I spot the family resemblence, then?
Because I wasn't looking for it, and because the face you see in a mirror is not the face other people see-it's the mirror image, which can be quite a different matter entirely.
I don't know what I would have done if, ten minutes after making love to her, I had suddenly realized that she was my long-lost sister.
I didn't realize it.
I feasted my eyes on the loveliness of flanks and haunches, breasts and buttocks, belly and thighs. I held her in my arms a dozen times, squeezing her as though I wanted to make her body permanently a part of my own.
Then, around two in the morning, she said, "I think I ought to start going home."
"Stay the night."
"I couldn't, Jim. Mrs. Thomas wouldn't understand. She's almost like a mother to me. Since I never had a real mother. I try to pretend I'm a good girl, and she goes along with the pretense. I never have men in my room and I never stay out all night."
"Aren't you kind of old for that kind of stuff?"
"While I live there, I'll live her way. Okay?"
I smiled and chucked her under the chin. "Anything you say, doll."
We began to get dressed. I watched in awed fascination as she slipped into her clothes. She was so graceful, so fluid. Hiding her body from me with clothes seemed almost a sin. But at last she was dressed, and the high thrusts of her breasts were encased in two layers of cloth, and the dimpled rounds of her buttocks now were tightly wrapped in turquoise, and I had my memories to keep me warm.
On the way home I said, "Mind a personal question? How old are you, Lisa?"
"Going on 23. And you?"
"I'll be 25 in a few months. How come a girl like you is still single at that advanced age?"
"Because I never met anybody that I wanted to wake up next to every day for the rest of my life, is why."
"A good reason. Think you'll ever meet such a guy?"
"I might."
"Soon?"
"Who knows?"
We were both grinning. It was too early for either of us to talk about marriage, but it was certainly in the air. Even though our first date had been only four days ago. We went together so perfectly that it seemed a foregone conclusion, to me, and I think, to her, that we would have to get married eventually.
I stopped in front of her house. We went up the stairs together, and we kissed, hard, and when we parted she said, "I've got a date with one of the vice-presidents for Monday. Do you want me to break it, Jim?"
"That's not mine to decide."
"Yes, it is. Just say the word."
"What do you want to do on Monday?" I asked.
"I want to spend it with you. And Sunday and Tuesday and Wednesday and all the rest. What about you?"
"The same."
"Then I'll break the date," she said.
We kissed again, and she started to slip into the shadows. The last thing she said to me was, "This has been the happiest day of my life."
I could have said the same thing.
Funny. Suppose you had come up and whispered to me that on account of this day, I'd suffer nine kinds of hell, and that the smartest move would be to get the deuce out of California and forget all about Lisa Andrews?
I would have laughed in your face.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next week was about the greatest I had ever known. I saw Lisa every night. Although around the lab we didn't see each other, didn't even spend our lunch hours together, the evenings were ours. I would meet her at five o'clock every day and drive her home, and we would plan how we would spend our evening.
No matter what we did, though, our evenings always included one vital ingredient: Sex.
We had a terrific physical yen for each other, and we didn't let anything come between us and the gratification of that yen. We gave ourselves up to desires joyously and without any hesitation.
Monday night she came to my room. It was a torrid session that left our first interlude way behind. We spent hours exploring each other's bodies minutely, testing to see what was stimulating and where. Fabulous. When I finally got to sleep that night, the arching hills of Lisa's breasts and buttocks filled my mind.
Tuesday we made it in the park. Honestly-just like a couple of scruffy teen-agers. We wanted to do it outdoors, and we went to the park.
There was hardly any moon that night, and we found a quiet corner between some eucalyptus trees and settled down on the soft fragrant ground.
I put my hand under her dress and found the soft coolness of her thighs, and moved higher.
She had skipped wearing panties tonight.
"Surprised?" she asked.
"I bet it's cooler this way," I said.
"Yes and no," she laughed. "Right now I feel very, very hot."
I pushed the dress up over her hips, and there was the lovely nakedness of her. Our bodies joined in the dimness and it was wonderful all the way, and when is was over we lay on our backs in the darkness and held hands and listened to the sounds of the night.
Wednesday we continued the teen-age routine-
This time we did it in a parked car.
We had gone over to Berkeley to see a foreign movie at one of the art theaters near the campus. It was a French movie-very intimate-and we were both in a steamed-up mood as we came out. We got into the car and I started it and put my right hand on Lisa's thigh, feeling the firm suppleness of it, and I said, "I don't know how I'm going to be able to wait till we get back to my place."
"Why wait?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said. "Why wait?"
We found a dead-end street with only a couple of houses on it, pulled up, in the darkest part, and got into the back seat, and turned to each other.
Lisa laughed. "You know how long it is since I made it in a car, Jim? Four years."
I smiled, but I wasn't really amused. For all my talk of not caring about Lisa's past, I didn't like to think that she had been doing it with other guys, in other cars-four years ago or four hundred. There's something seamy about giving it to a guy in a car. I didn't mind getting it from Lisa myself this way, just once, for the hell of it. But I didn't like to think of her as the kind of girl who had once done it regularly.
I pushed that out of my mind. Lisa leaned back and assumed the position-one leg on the back seat and the other draped up over the front seat. I slid easily between her cool thighs, and pushed up her skirt. Once again the little witch had left her panties home, and I took her easily and quickly.
In the park, in a car-kid stuff. Fun to do for the hell of it, but not often. Give me a bedroom and a bed any time.
The next night we were back at my place, where we didn't have to worry about cops with flashlights, here we could lock the door and have all the privacy anyone would ever need, where we could strip down and go at it body to naked body, the right way.
That as how we did it on Thursday. We had a light snack at the pizzeria, and then Lisa came up to my room.
In a second she was out of her clothes, and there she stood, slim and naked and lovely. I went over to her and put my hands on her breasts; she put her tongue in my mouth and I cupped the taut-stretched, globular rounds of her buttocks. She pulled my clothes off and I sprawled out on the bed and she crawled all over me, and I felt sudden fire as her lips reached me, and I gasped and shivered and rose to her. It was great, that night-
It was a long night of breasts and buttocks, of thighs, of sweet-smelling black hair dangling in my face. I begged Lisa to stay right on through the night, but she wouldn't.
"I've got to go home," she insisted.
So at two in the morning I drove her home. I was dead tired and had to keep fighting to stay awake at the wheel. The past few days had taken a lot out of me, and all I wanted was to curl up with my face against Lisa's pointed breasts and sleep for about a week. I'm as virile as the next guy, but enough's enough even for Superman.
Lisa wasn't letting me get any rest. Not that I was really complaining about it, you understand. Just that after an evening in the hay, I would have preferred to put my arms around her and slip off to dreamland, instead of getting dressed and slogging out into the night to take her home. The home-delivery service was costing me an hour of sleep a night, practically.
Thursday night had one extra complication. I took Lisa home and kissed her goodnight and watched her go inside, and then drove back to my place with my mind all full of pleasant, sleepy thoughts. The taste of Lisa's body was still on my lips, the texture of her breasts was vivid in my memory, the sweet scent of her.
I parked my car and went upstairs and there was Ronnie camped out in front of my door.
"Hi," she said.
I looked at her without enthusiasm. "Hi. Long time no see."
She nodded. "That's why I came around. For a little visit. You mind?"
"Well, I'm pretty tired-"
She grinned. "You ought to be. I heard those bed-springs going all evening. I'll just stay a little while, okay?"
There was no turning her away. I opened the door and we went in. Ronnie draped her long, voluptuous body over an overstuffed armchair. She was wearing her usual plaid flannel shirt and faded blue jeans. The shirt was open two or three buttons at the throat, and whenever she shifted position I could see the heavy bells of her breasts inside, but in my present condition the sight didn't stir up much of any feeling in me.
"Who's the girl friend?" she asked.
"Someone who works at my company."
"Is it serious?"
"So far." I resented discussing Lisa with Ronnie. But Ronnie didn't seem to take the hint. She reached out, caught a wine-bottle, and helped herself to a good swig.
She said, "Going to marry her, Jim?"
"Who knows?"
"You know. You just aren't saying."
I shrugged. "I've only known her a couple of weeks.
It's too soon for talk like that. But I like her. I enjoy being wfth her. You might almost say I'm in love with her, as a matter-of-fact"
Ronnie nodded without saying anything, and let wine roll down her gullet Just then she reminded me of some big cat some predatory kind of cat, noiseless and sleek and always ready to pounce. She finished the wine and then looked up at me.
"Can we still be friends even with her in the pic-tare?" she asked.
"I don't see why not"
"Friends of the opposite sex sometimes get friendly," Ronnie said. "I came up here tonight to be friendly. Can I get a little something, or are you saving it all for your new chick?"
"I'd rather not, Ronnie."
"Not tonight, or not ever?"
"Certainly not tonight. Maybe not ever."
"That's foolish, Jim. Never tie yourself up with one person. Sexual monopolies lead to heartbreak."
"I'm doing what I want most in the world to do," I told her. I yawned, "I'm sorry, Ronnie. We had some fun together, and I won't forget you. But for the time being I'm afraid-"
"Sure," she said, nodding. "I understand. You've had a belated rush of morals to the head and you want to stay chaste for her. Well, I won't quarrel with that." She smiled sadly. "Cest la vie. I was in a lonely mood tonight, and I guess I'll stay lonely. Sorry to have kept you up."
"Look, Ronnie-"
That's okay," the said airily. "Don't apologize. I know how it is. All right. I'll go shuffling along. Can I have one kiss, anyway-for old times' sake?"
I felt like a louse. The girl was obviously depressed-she had come up here for a little sex and comfort, and I was handing her a lot of high-minded crud about how I was in love and had to renounce other women. But it was true. I mean, I felt so strongly about Lisa that I didn't want Ronnie one bit just then.
But Ronnie had a little surprise for me.
I said, "Okay. A goodnight kiss."
She slid out of the armchair and came toward me. It started as an innocent kiss, a chaste good night. But it mushroomed fast. She put her lips to mine, and the next moment she was pressing tight-and her tongue was in my mouth and she was panting hard and gripping me tight. Then she ran her hand quickly down the front of her shirt, the remaining buttons opened, and there were her breasts, two round, heavy masses of firm flesh. And I came alive.
I didn't want it to happen. I was dead tired-absolutely beat-and I wasn't interested in Ronnie any more. My mind was full of Lisa, or so I thought.
But then my hands were on Ronnie's breasts and I was feeling her nipples like little plum-pits against my hands and suddenly I was snorting like a stallion all over again and wanting her like crazy.
After that she could do what she wanted with me. And she did. She unzipped her dungarees and pulled them down over her hips and thighs. There she was naked, and she turned to the side, giving me a view of the lush dimpled heaviness of her buttocks; and I lost no time getting out of my clothes.
Ronnie flopped back on my bed. Her knees went up in the air and her thighs opened. I came down on her.
She must have been in an awfully bad way. She reached up for me and took me in with a kind of really frenzied urgency, as though she had been locked in solitary confinement for ten years without a candle.
Our bodies joined, and as I scythed into her I thought of Lisa, and how only two or three hours ago I have been doing the same thing with her. There was a bitter taste in my mouth-I was disgusted with myself.
Look at it from the other viewpoint, I thought. Suppose Lisa lived in a rooming house and she spent a few hours in bed with you, and then you took her home and kissed her good night, and you loved her and she said she loved you, and then she went upstairs and proceeded to lay some other guy? You'd feel pretty sore about it if you found out.
I knew all that And don't think I didn't feel lousy about what I was doing now.
But I couldn't help myself. I was Ronnie's slave. She had hypnotized me with those two giant breasts of hers, and I was unable to resist. Down she drew me, into that bottomless chasm, and there was no turning back.
Our linking bodies writhed on the bed and her lusts rose like swirling tongues of flame around a summer-dried barn, and we both were caught up in it.
I hated myself for every moment of it, but I gave her a good ride, all the same. I was fully awake, fully alive, alert to her needs. She demanded, and I gave, and soon there was the pounding, throbbing climax-first for her, then for me-and then still for her after I was finished, and I gritted my teeth and carried things on until the last whimpered moan escaped her lips and she lay back, satisfied, fulfilled. I felt like throwing up.
I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at her. She was a big girl-stretched out like this she looked like the kind of girls you see only on barber shop calendars, with breasts like watermelons and long, long, long legs. She smiled at me.
I said, "That wasn't right, Ronnie."
"I'm sorry. I needed it, Jim. I've been having a pretty rough time of it, and I heeded it bad. Your girl friend would forgive you. There was nothing personal in it for you. You were just helping out a friend, lending her a part of your body for a little while."
"Yeah," I said. "You put it so nicely."
"Will you forgive me, Jim? Someday you may need it just as bad, and I'll be here to give it to you."
"Okay. Okay." I wanted to drop the subject. If I had been tired before Ronnie showed up, I was dead beat now. My bit with Ronnie had been one of those fluke outlays of energy that you sometimes can muster when you least expect it, a last gasp. Now I was shot.
I lay back on the pillow.
I started to say something, but I fell asleep right in the middle of the first word.
When a couple of hundred years had gone by, some body shook my shoulder. I opened one eye and saw a huge round breast dangling near my face, swaying from side to side in slow rhythm.
Ronnie, I came awake fast, "What time is it?" I asked
"Eight," she said. "Eight in the morning. Time for you to get to work."
I rubbed my eyes-sunlight was slanting into the room, I still felt tired, though not with that end-of-the-rope exhaustion of late last night. Roonie was naked ' crouching on the bed in front of me. I sat up and she got off the bed and walked to the window, throwing open the blinds. I looked at the giant globes of her buttocks, the firm-fleshed, big nakedness of her.
I remembered the night before, now-how I had had a ball with Lisa. And then how I had come home bushed, only to be tricked into a tumble with Ronnie.
"Did you sleep here?" I asked.
She nodded. "You were very restless. Tossing and turning." .
"I thought I slept like a log," I said.
I got out of bed. Ronnie was wandering around the room naked. I looked down at myself, and to my disgust, I saw that I wanted her. She saw it too, and she was smiling.
So that was how much love was worth, I thought bitterly. You meet a girl and you tell her all kind of nonsense. And you tell yourself that the sun rises and sets on her, and her alone. Then another chick coming along and throws her boobs at you, and you tumble right into the hay with her despite your fancy words. And the morning after, you feel guilty, but you're still m the mood.
Ronnie said, "What time do you have to be at work?"
"Nine. Why?"
She pointed at me. "I thought I could take advantage of your condition. But there isn't time. I wouldn't want you to be late. Save it for her. What's her name, anyway?"
"Lisa."
"Lisa. Okay. Save that one for Lisa. I'll see you around, Jim. Give her my best."
She pulled her jeans up over her hips, and I heaved a sigh of relief. She buttoned her blouse, waved to me, and headed for the door. I didn't make the mistake of offering to kiss her goodbye.
I got dressed and went down the hall to the community bathroom for a shower, and a shave. Then I made it to the place on the corner for some juice, a roll, and a cup of coffee, and then it was into the Chevy and off for the freeway and work.
I felt like a heel.
I felt like a real louse.
It wasn't as though I was married to Lisa or anything. But in my mind I had been telling myself that this was it, this was something special. And yet I hadn't resisted Ronnie at all. The incident told me a lot about my strength of character. It told me that I didn't have very much, at least when it came to sex. Which was something I already knew. The lure of the thigh has always fascinated me. And I've never spent too much time wondering about fine points of morality.
Still and all, if I wanted to go with Lisa, I would have to behave myself. She was a girl with class. She didn't deserve to be treated that way.
I felt so guilty that I kept away from her all day. I didn't go near the personnel office at lunch time.
As five o'clock approached, I started chewing my nails a little, since I had agreed to pick Lisa up as usual.
I couldn't face her-
I felt guilty as hell.
But I forced myself to go over there. I was positive that she would be able to read the truth in my face. She would take one look at me and say, "Did you really have to go to bed with that girl last night? Didn't I give you enough pleasure? Oh, Jim, I'm so disappointed in you. This is such a let-down." And similar stuff, until I promised to be a good boy.
I was wrong, though.
Lisa wasn't any mind-reader, and she didn't give me an all-exposed looks. She looked troubled, thought. The moment I saw her, I knew that something was wrong.
I took her in my arms outside the personnel office, and she kissed me; but it was a tentative, distant kiss. Her eyes were worried.
"Something wrong?" I asked, forgetting all about Ronnie and my guilt feelings.
She nodded. "I got a phone call an hour ago. My father's had a stroke."
"Oh. I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "Is he in serious condition?"
"He's not going to have to go to the hospital, or anything like that," she said. "But this will be a real blow to him. He's always prided himself on his perfect health. He's never been willing to admit he'd getting old. And now, out of the blue-"
"Is he an elderly man?" I asked, still innocent as a babe in the woods.
"He's in his early fifties," Lisa said, as we started to walk to the car. "Jim, listen, I hate to break our date for tonight, but I've got to go out there to him. He asked for me. I haven't spoken to him in months. We don't get along, you know. But tonight-"
"Sure," I said. She didn't know it, but after last night I was privately glad to get some rest. "Where does he live? Oakland?"
"That's right. He's got a house out there." Her lips curled bitterly. "And a mistress to take care of him. That's the sort of man he is. But now that he's had a stroke maybe he'll stop helling around and act his age. He's really a disgusting man. I know it isn't right to speak that way about your own father, but-"
"What time are you going there?"
"I'm expected around seven. I figured I'd have a snack first, then hop a bus across."
"Want me to drive you?" I said suddenly.
"Don't put yourself to any trouble."
"It won't be," I insisted. "Let's grab some hamburgers, and then we can go out there. I've never seen Oakland anyway, and it's a nice night for driving."
If I had known what I was letting myself in for, I would have kept my mouth shut, gone home, and gotten a badly needed evening of rest. But I've got a talent for getting into messes.
I got into a beauty this time.
We drove toward town and stopped in a roadhouse for a light dinner. Lisa was terribly worried about her old man, and I got the impression that she felt plenty guilty for having moved out on him, leaving him to his own devices.
"But I couldn't stay with him any more," she said. "Girls all the time, one after another. His women running around the house naked-they didn't even close the bedroom door at night-the drinking, the laughing-I had to get away."
"How old were you when you moved out?"
"Seventeen."
"He didn't stop you?"
"He didn't give a damn. All he said was he figured I'd make out okay. He never worried much about me. I was always in the way-he was glad to see me go."
"And you've been on your own since you were seventeen?"
She nodded. "It's been an interesting life. But lonely at times. Until I met you. Now it's all going to change, Jim."
She was right. It was all going to change.
But, as we drove toward Oakland and my first meeting with her father, neither of us had any inkling of what that change was going to be.
CHAPTER SIX
Lisa's father's place was a neat, moderately big two-story brick house on a street of neat, moderately big two-story brick houses. Each house was set on a nice big plot of its own, maybe as much as three quarters of an acre of land, which immediately marked this off as one of the higher-bracket suburban areas. I figured the houses there must run $50,000 and up.
"What does your father do?" I asked as we pulled into the driveway. I noted a shiny, cream-colored Cadillac sitting in the open garage.
"He's a real estate developer," Lisa said. "He buys undeveloped tracts, gets contractors to put up houses, and sells out to management companies. It's strictly a capital gains kind of deal."
"He must do well," I said.
"Well enough-enough to buy him the fanciest mistresses money can buy."
We went in. The front door was open. Lisa pressed the button, and chimes sounded as we entered.
The house looked as expensive on the inside as on the outside: wall-to-wall carpeting, and no cheap cotton stuff either; expensive-looking furniture; paintings; a sprawling hi-fi set; a very expensive dame, who came out to greet us.
She was about thirty. Her face and figure looked to be around 23, but her eyes were a lot older. She was tall, which didn't stop her from teetering around on rhinestone-studded platform pumps, and the big bouffant hairdo added to her size. I disliked her on the spot. She looked like one of those vampirish females who live from one beauty parlor appointment to the next. The huge pile of hair was the thing that teed me off the most, I think.
Of course, the figure was something very special. She was wearing an informal lounging outfit, chartreuse capri pants and a kind of tight pullover, and I was treated to a stunning set of outjuttlng breasts and a flamboyantly curved pair of hips. She walked with a wiggle. She talked with a purr. She glanced at Lisa offhandedly, then gave me a complete head-to-toe scrutiny, pausing at my midsection for so long that I was sure she must have X-Ray vision.
Then she said, "Hello, Lisa. Who's this?"
"A friend of mine named Jim. How's my father?"
"He's doing fine. The doctor says hell be up and around in a few days. Disappointed?"
The two women exchanged venomous glances. Then the beehive-head minced over to me, giving it plenty of wiggle, and said, "Lisa hates my guts, so she won't even introduce me. My name's Kelly. That's the first name, I mean. Kelly Green."
"Isn't that just the cutest name you ever heard?" Lisa asked me, with a cutting edge on her voice. "Dad thinks it's tremendous. He's already got his next two or three mistresses lined up, and you ought to hear their names. There's this redhead named Sky Blue; and then a sexy brunette name of Jet Black; and after he gets tired of her there's going to be a little dish called Shocking Pink-"
Kelly Green hissed something at Lisa that didn't sound printable. Sparks were crackling through the air-in another second there'd be a real donnybrook going. I wondered whether I would see handfuls of that platinum fuzzball of Kelly's being ripped out as Lisa got to work on her.
"Easy, girls," I said warningly. "Don't fight in front of company."
Lisa nodded. "You're right. I'm going in to see my father. Jim, come meet him."
Kelly Green said, "You better ask the doctor if he can have two visitors at once, first. The doctor may not like the idea."
Lisa nodded and went into the bedroom.
That left me alone with Kelly Green.
Kelly leaned against a table and took a deep breath, pushing her breasts upward and outward. I could see the little rises of the nipples thrusting against the sheeny satin of her pullover. I was intended to see them.
Kelly said, "Who are you?"
"A guy named Jim."
"I can figure that. How do you know Lisa?"
"We work at the same place."
"You a scientist?"
"A lab technician," I said. "I'm studying to be an engineer."
"That's nice. I once knew an engineer. He built bridges."
"Not that kind of engineer," I said. "I'm studying electronics."
She edged back to show off her figure a little better. "Shacking with Lisa?" she asked bluntly. "What of it?"
"Just wondering. She'd be a nice kid if she wasn't such a witch."
"That's a matter of opinion," I said.
"I guess it is. Is she trying to run your life the way she used to run her father's? She really gave him hell, you know. Disapproved of his taste in women and everything."
"Listen," I said, "I don't like this conversation a hell of a lot."
She smiled. "I'm sorry. I don't want to get you riled up. I like you, Jim. Maybe we can meet for a drink sometime or other."
"Maybe," I said.
She chose that moment to knock an ashtray off the table. She swung around quickly and bent to pick it up. She bent from the hips, and the capri pants pulled tight over her buttocks. The view was impressive. She held it lor a moment, long enough for me to take in the scenery, and then straightened up.
All right, I thought. So Kelly Green was making a play for me. And so Kelly Green had a nice backside. She was still the mistress of Lisa's father, and at the moment I didn't need that kind of complication.
Lisa came back into the room. She glanced sharply from Kelly to me, and from me to Kelly, as though she expected Kelly to be half-naked by this time and pulling me down on top of her.
Then Lisa said, "The doctor gives us permission. Come meet my father, Jim."
"I wouldn't want to put a strain on him," I said, since I wasn't particularly interest in meeting him.
"He won't be strained," Lisa said. "Come on in and say hello. He'd like to meet you."
I got the idea that Lisa felt nervous about leaving me alone with Kelly Green, and that was why she wanted to haul me into the sick man's room. But I couldn't very well refuse to go.
Kelly shot me a torrid glance as I went out.
We crossed through the house and entered a downstairs bedroom no bigger than the infield at Connie Mack Stadium. Lisa's father was esconced in a huge triplex bed, with his body propped up on pillows.
He was a big man.
Even lying down, he looked big. His shoulders were broader than mine; and his arms, lying at his sides on top of the covers, were thick and enormously long. Judging from his torso alone, I guessed his height at about six feet four or five. I later saw that I wasn't so far from wrong.
He looked younger than his age. His hair was black and thick, and his face was unlined. He looked like a powerful man in more than the physical sense, a man who lived to the hilt, who knew how to make other people hop to his bidding. But right then he looked like a very sick man. The stroke had paralyzed the muscles of one cheek, as strokes often do, and his face on the left side was puckered and distorted, with the mouth drawn up in a kind of slack grin. That was the only visible sign of his affliction; but it was enough, because it jarred with the robust appearance of his body.
And when he spoke, it was only the right side of his face that moved. Even his tongue was partly affected, so his words were thick.
"Hello, young fellow," he said. His voice was a booming basso.
Lisa said, "Dad, this is a friend of mine from the office. He drove me over here. Jim Collins. Jim, this is my father, Sam Andrews."
I donned a saying-hello-to-your-girl's-dad smile and said, "Glad to know you, Mr. Andrews. I was sorry to hear of your-attack."
"Nothing. Nothing at all. Be up and around in a day or so," he said fuzzily. He made a sweeping, contemptuous gesture to tell me how unimportant his stroke was. But he gestured only with the right hand. The left arm didn't budge. "What did you say your name was?" he asked, talking as though he had marbles in his mouth."
"Collins. Jim Collins."
He frowned, but the frown passed away quickly enough. Naturally, I had no way of knowing what though was passing through his mind as he heard my name. I might have had a stroke myself if I knew.
"You from the West Coast?" he asked. I shook my head. "No, sir. Back east. I just moved out here a few weeks ago."
"Where from?"
"Philadelphia," I said.
Again the frown. This time he looked sort of pale, and his one good arm came to his face and massaged the paralyzed part in a tense, scrubbing gesture.
"Seeing a lot of Lisa?" he asked.
"Some."
"She's a good girl, Lisa. But bossy. She'll try to run your life, like any woman. Women always run men's lives if they get a half chance. You-"
"Dad, don't get all worked up," Lisa said. She glanced at the doctor, who was standing quietly in the corner of the room, writing out some kind of memorandum.
Sam Andrews settled back against the pillows. I studied him. He was a strong man, a hard man, that was obvious. He probably resented bitterly the stroke that had laid him low. Most likely he wanted to kick, to break things. He was big and domineering-a hard man to like, but harder not to respect. I was not inclined to think much of him, considering the tough time he had given Lisa all her life. But I could see that he really cared for her, in a cold, peculiar way.
The doctor said, "Time for your injection, Mr. Andrews, and then I'll be going."
I didn't want to be around to see this once-powerful man getting needled in the rear like a sick baby. So I mumbled some excuse and went outside. Lisa stayed behind to discuss her father's care with the doctor.
Kelly Green was sitting in the living room, with an ice bucket and some mixings in front of her.
"Well?" she asked. "How is he now?"
"He looks paralyzed on one side," I said.
"Crap. Do they recover from that kind of thing?"
"Sometimes," I said. "How long have you been living with him?"
"A year. And I don't feel like moving on. You think this is going to hurt his sex drive?" she asked anxiously.
I shrugged. "I'm not a doctor. Depends on where he's paralyzed, anyway. Some men have six kids even though they're paralyzed. He looks strong as an ox-I bet hell be good as new in a couple of months."
"I hope so," she said, stirring her drink. "I depend on that man. I've never known anyone like him. In bed, I mean. He's an ox, a bull. He's the kind of man I need. I'm hard to satisfy in bed, you know. I'm not one of these kids, you touch her breasts and she's ready to go. I need a real loving, and Sam gives it to me. I'd hate to have him put out of commission. You want a drink?"
I did, and told her so. I could see she had had more than one herself already. She mixed a stiff one for me and freshened her own. Her way of freshening it was to add about four ounces of gin and a new ice cube.
She went to work on the new drink and tossed out a few additional intimate details of her relations with Sam Andrews. It made me queasy just to listen to her. She didn't hold anything back. Well, I could see her point of view. She had obviously been getting something special, and now Andrews was faced with the possibility of being a useless invalid. Poor Kelly Green would have to find herself somebody else to keep her happy in bed.
From the way she was looking at me, I got the idea she wouldn't mind having a sample to see if I could fill Sam Andrews' boots.
About fifteen minutes later, Lisa came out. She looked worried.
"Well?" I said.
"He's resting now," she said. "The doctor gave him a sedative. Jim, this is going to be rough on him. He's very bitter about it. He's never been sick a day in his life, and now he's flat on his back and can't do a thing about it."
"Is he badly paralyzed?" I asked.
"His whole left side."
"What's the chance of recovery?" Kelly wanted to know.
Lisa shrugged. "There's no way of telling. The doctor says there's been brain damage, and sometimes it heals, sometimes it doesn't. He'll have to do exercises, build himself up again. The doctor says that if he recovers at all, it won't be for months. And there'll probably always be traces of the stroke-maybe a limp, maybe a thickness of speech."
I didn't see any tears in Lisa's eyes. She wasn't softhearted. He was her father, and so she would take care of him; but there wasn't much love in her soul for him, and she obviously didn't pity him a hell of a lot. I got the impression she saw the stroke as his just deserts.
Lisa turned to me and said apologetically, "Jim, I'm going to stay here at least for the weekend. I'm sorry, but I feel I ought to be with him."
"Of course. It's all right."
"I know we were going to spend the weekend together, but then this came up-"
"There'll be plenty of time later."
Kelly Green stirred uneasily. "Hey, what about me, then?"
"What about you?" Lisa said coldly.
"The two of us under the same roof?"
"I'm staying here to take care of my father," Lisa said. "You can stay here or not, as you please."
"There'll be trouble," Kelly warned.
"You keep out of my way and I'll keep out of yours," Lisa said. "There's no need for friction. It's a big enough house."
Kelly made a sour face. I could see she wasn't looking forward to having Lisa move in.
Well, that was a problem for the two of them to solve, and I only hoped they wouldn't rip each other's hair out while solving it. I decided it was time for my exit. Lisa was preoccupied with her father, and there wasn't much I could do hanging around here. I would go home, read for a while, hit the hay early.
"Well," I said, "I guess I'll be skipping out. I'll come over here tomorrow afternoon, okay, Lisa? To spend a couple of hours."
"Fine," she said.
I started toward the door. Kelly got to her feet and said, "I'm taking off too. I'll drive into the city and see a movie while you're playing nurse."
Lisa said, "Do what you like."
"You want me to pick up some groceries or something?" Kelly asked, in a gesture toward peace.
Lisa stared at her. "You think you're taking the car?" she asked.
"Why not?"
"You leave the car here," Lisa said. "I might have to get something in a hurry from the drugstore."
"Drugstores deliver," Kelly said sourly.
"I know," Lisa said. "All the same, if you want to get to town, take the bus."
For a moment I thought war would rage. Then Kelly turned sweetly toward me and said, "Can I get a lift with you, Jim? I can always take the bus back."
I blinked. All of a sudden I was in the middle. I looked at Lisa, but her face was a blank.
"I guess I can manage it," I said hesitantly.
"Thanks. I'll go get ready. Be with you in a jiff."
Kelly ran upstairs. Lisa turned to me and said, "I could kill that girl, you know that?"
"She isn't worth getting worked up over, Lisa."
"She's a gold-digger and a witch and a tramp."
"Those aren't incitements to murder," I said. "She made your father happy. What do you care? Live and let live, Lisa."
"It isn't so easy. Oh, Jim, I'm sorry all this mess had to come up. I wanted to spend every minute of the weekend with you-in your arms-"
I smiled. "The worst will be over for your father in a couple of days. As soon as he's recovering, we can see each other full time again. And make up for lost time."
"Right."
She was in my arms then. I felt the hard points of her breasts against me, and there was a terrific surge of desire inside me. I felt annoyed at her father for getting his stroke and robbing me of my weekend's pleasure.
"I'll see you tomorrow," she whispered. "Tomorrow," I said.
I kissed her lightly and started for the door. "Tell Kelly I'll start the car and wait out front for her."
"Okay," Lisa called.
I back out of the driveway and idled in front of the house. A couple of minutes later, Kelly appeared, still in the pullover and capri pants-not exactly movie-going togs, but that was her privilege. She crossed the walk, switching her hips from side to side, and got into the car. Her perfume began to invade the whole place. She leaned back, draping one arm over the seat.
I glanced at her. Those pants were so tight they were practically about to split. The pullover was the same. They fit her like skin grafts.
I pulled away from the curb.
As we crossed the bridge into San Francisco, I said, "Where to?"
"Oh, anywhere. You know any good movies in town?"
"Well, now-"
"That's okay. I don't really feel like seeing a movie. I'll just shop for a while."
"It's nine o'clock. The stores are closed."
"You're right," she said. "Well, maybe I'll have a couple of drinks and head back. Anything to get away from Her Saintliness. Christ, I hate her!"
"Lisa's no saint," I said.
"You ought to know. Been making it with her?"
"My business."
"Okay," she said. "I say it's ten to one you have. So now I've got one more thing to hate her for."
"What's that?"
"Having you."
"Look," I said, "what makes you so sure-"
"Don't play innocent. You aren't the kind of man who dates a girl just to hold hands. You've been making it with her. I know your type. It's the same type as Sam Andrews-you even look a little like him. He's bigger than you are, but you've got the same neck. Size nineteen, I bet. Like a bull. In every way." She leaned close to me and nibbled my ear. The car swerved and almost hit a taxi. There was wild wail of horns. "Watch that stuff," I said.
"Don't you like me? Don't you think I'm sexy?" I didn't answer.
I was right in the middle of town, now. I knew that Kelly Green was going to make a play for me, and I told myself that I was going to turn her down cold. She was sexy-yes, of course. But she was selfish and cruel and lazy, and she just wanted to use me. I wasn't going to be used. It was bad enough last night with Ronnie-I wouldn't let Kelly seduce me. I had to have some shred of honor: there was Lisa, tending her sick father, and wouldn't it be stomach-turning if I ran off and slept with her father's mistress in the meanwhile?
I was puffed up with righteousness. When Kelly made her ptich, I was going to tell her exactly where she could go, and what she could shove there.
Sure.
And then she said, "You know where I want you to take me?"
"Where?"
"Your apartment," she said.
I bit my lip; I remembered my fancy resolutions of about three minutes earlier.
And then I took her to my apartment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
You know how it is. You say you're going to be a good boy, but when the chips are down you crap out. With some guys it's booze. They're never going to touch another drop, they tell you. Until they see that neon sign that says BAR, and they make a bee-line. With other guys it's the horses. They drop a couple of grand, and then they swear off, until they start thinking about that sure thing next week at Hialeah, and they figure they can recoup their earlier losses. Still other guys, it's the stock market. They can't stay away from the ticker tape machines. With me it was women.
Just a guy who couldn't say no. Especially with something like Kelly Green sitting next to me whispering
"Yes!"
So I took her to my apartment.
Such that it was. She prowled the one room, giving it a once-over and probably coming to the quick conclusion that I wasn't up to much financially, which was true. Then she turned to me and slipped into my arms.
She kissed like a pro. I don't mean that there was anything cold and calculating about her kiss. I mean that it was an expert job: she knew when to use her tongue and when to use her teeth, and what to do with her hands while our mouths were joined, and how to move her body. It was a pretty torrid kind of kiss, let me tell you.
Then we started to undress. We didn't waste much time getting to it, because it was late and she had a long trip back to Oakland ahead of her. I got the pullover off her, and there was a little wispy bra underneath, and when I unhooked it her breasts tumbled free. Big boobs, as big as Ronnie's and soft, silky, neat.
Then the capri pants. She hadn't bothered with underpants, of course. They would have made little ridges under the capris, and she wouldn't have wanted that. So under the tight pants was nothing but Kelly Green.
She was built. I mean solidly and firmly. Although she was narrow at the waist, she was heavy in a lot of other places. Her buttocks were curved and jiggly. Her breasts swayed and quivered. She was built on a lush scale. And I made the interesting discovery that she was that rare bird, the natural platinum blonde. She had helped nature along, chemically, a little, but the basic color was that unusual white-gold that you don't always find.
She stood in the middle of the room, showing me everything she had.
"You like it?" she asked.
"I've seen worse."
"That the best you can tell me?"
"I'm not the kind who runs off at the mouth," I said. "I like it, Kelly. I like it a whole lot."
"It's all real, too."
"Yeah," I said. "I gather that."
She glanced at me. "How about you? Are you as great as you look?"
"I like to think so."
"Show me, pal."
I showed her. I climbed out of my clothes in jiffy time, walked toward her, and she nodded.
"Yeah, you're okay," she said in a quiet voice. "You're just like Sam, do you know that? The two of you make a pair. A couple of men."
"But I'm thirty years younger than he is. I bet I can do things he's forgotten how."
"Don't be so sure," she told me with a smile.
Then she came toward me.
I felt just a twinge of guilt as her cool body touched mine. I thought of Lisa, tending her sick father while Kelly and I played the oldest game. I admitted to myself that I was a faithless louse, and what could I do about it? Then I took her in my arms.
Her breasts filled my hands nicely. They were good to hold. I moved them from side to side and up and down, rolling them around, and Kelly made little gasping sounds of pleasure. She snuggled against me and forced me back against the bed, and down. Her lips were cool against me as her tongue playfully licked out. She ran her cheek against the mat of hair on my chest, then moved lower. I caught my breath sharply as she surrounded me.
For a long while her lips moved, and I closed my eyes and stroked her platinum hair as shivers of ecstasy went through me. Then she began to crawl down my body toward my feet, and I opened my eyes and saw the taut globes of her buttocks just in front of me.
I leaned forward a little-she made a little sighing sound as I touched her.
We held that position for a while. She was an expert at it. After a while I pulled myself up and around, so that she was crouching on the bed with her back to me. I felt her silky buttocks move from side to side against my belly, in a gesture of need.
"Take me, big man," she whispered.
I moved forward, and in the same moment I put my hands underneath her to grasp the swinging rounds of her breasts. She backed up, wriggling and twisting, driving me closer yet. A deep-throated moan burst from her lips as I went for China.
Our bodies were joined, now. Her skin was warm with excitement. We moved in unison, while I squeezed her breasts and caressed the nipples.
And Kelly talked.
I won't try to set down the things that she said. They didn't make any sense, anyway. She was just talking gibberish, and dirty gibberish at that. It was one long stream of Anglo-Saxon words, as though somebody had put a cesspool into reverse and it was spouting a geyser of filth. She seemed to get a kind of pleasure out of the words. Once or twice before I had run across girls with the comulsion to talk vulgar as they got excited, but never like this.
Then it reached a crescendo. Kelly ripped off a streak of language that turned the air blue, and then yelled, "Now! Give it all you've got, Jim! I'm-I'm almost there-"
I gave it.
I gave it so much I thought I was going to hurt her, but she only gasped more excitedly and pressed her soft jiggly buttocks harder against me. The excitement took hold of me, and I felt fire rising.
Then it hit her. Hard. She half leaped like a harpooned whale, and threw herself down flat on her face on the bed. To stay with her, I had to lie down on top of her, covering her with my body, and as my weight came down she wriggled and jerked electrically. I couldn't take it any more-I bit down hard on the soft flesh of her shoulder and grabbed her breasts and clung to her and there was the tremendous impact of my fulfillment and hers, at one and the same time.
I carried her right up the mountainside. But when she reached the top she wasn't satisfied.
She rolled over, her eyes gleaming, her nostrils wide, her breasts going up and down.
"Now the regular way!" she whispered.
Usually I appreciate a little rest between rounds. Say, fifteen minutes, half an hour. But Kelly was showing no mercy. And there was something contagious about her excitement. She seemed almost panicky.
I understood.
I remembered now that she said she needed a lot of satisfying, that she wasn't like most girls. So the whole first round had been just to get her ready. Although she had a climax, it had been only a halfway kind of climax: it got her ready for the main event.
Okay, I thought. If old Sam Andrews could handle her, so could I. But now I began to see how Sam had come to have his stroke.
Kelly waited and this time I took her face to face. She arched her back underneath me, and I appreciated that. I showed my appreciation in the best way I knew.
Kelly appreciated my appreciation.
We went on appreciating each other for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. My brain felt clear and I was in full control of my body, and I figured I could go on till the end of the world, if I had to. But I knew I wouldn't have to-Kelly was showing all the signs of getting near a really big one.
Suddenly she sobbed. A real cry of misery.
And then the floodgates burst.
It was like being attached to a wildcat. She ran berserk underneath me. Her body heaved and throbbed and jumed around. I rode right with her, filling my hands with the high mounds of her breasts. She wrapped her legs around me in a scissor-grip and squeezed. I grinned and hugged her just as hard, and then I felt the pounding, insistent pulse of her fulfillment, and I relaxed my control and let it happen to me too.
For a long while the only sound in the room was harsh breathing.
Then I rolled away from her. I reached for the lamp but she said, "No, don't turn it on. My eyes are always sensitive afterward."
"Okay."
"I could use a butt."
"Coming up," I told her. I found the pack on the dresser and lit up one for each of us, and put the left-hand one in her mouth. She smiled at me.
"That was okay," she said.
"As good as old Sam?"
"Better. You're absolutely tremendous, yon know that?"
"Flattery will get you nowhere."
"I know. You're stuck on that witch Lisa, aren't you?"
"Let's not talk about her," I said. I didn't want her name on Kelly's lips, not while Kelly was lying naked on my bed.
Kelly sighed. "Life's a killer sometimes. If you only had his money, or he had your virility-"
"He does, I thought."
"He used to. What good's a man with a stroke?"
"Hell get better."
"Maybe. Maybe. But then hell be careful. What good's a careful man in bed? It won't be any good. No goddamn good at all." She stubbed out her cigarette. "Come here. Give me a kiss."
I walked across the darkened room and leaned down. I put my hands on her breasts, moving the heavy globes of flesh around. She turned her lips upward toward me, and at the same time I felt her hands sliding along my thighs.
Her fingers were very skillful.
We kissed for a long moment. When she was through with me, my desire had practically returned, and then she put her head down and in another thirty seconds she grinned. "Let's have one for the road," she whispered.
I took her. No fireworks, this time. It was all calm, gentle, easy. I was pretty well spent anyway. We moved along together to a calm, gentle, easy finale.
Then we lay in the dark and lit cigarettes again. She took my hand and put it on her breasts, but if she had any hopes of getting a fourth round out of me, she was doomed to disappointment.
After a while she said, "It's midnight. I'd better be getting back."
"Yeah."
"I'd stay the night, but Lisa would tell her father I stayed away."
"So?"
"He's jealous as hell. I can't afford to stir him up. Just in case he does recover and gets back to normal, I want to keep living there."
"Okay," I said. "Want me to drive you back?"
"Better not. She'd recognize your car."
"I could drop you a couple of blocks away," I said. "That's better than you having to take the bus at this hour of night."
"Wouldn't it be too much trouble?"
"It's only sleep," I said. "Tomorrow's Saturday anyhow. Get your clothes on and come on."
She slipped that plush body of hers back into pants and pullover, and in ten minutes we were ready to leave. I felt pretty tired out, and there was a nagging sense of guilt about the whole thing. Hell, I didn't even like the girl-as a person, that is. In bed she was great; but as a human being she was as selfish as they come, lazy, spoiled.
I felt lousy about having gone to bed with her. What the hell, though. Water under the bridge. I couldn't undo what had been done. I couldn't change my own nature.
As I headed toward the bridge to Oakland, though, I wondered whether things would change if I married Lisa, as I had been so seriously consideriag just a few days ago. What kind of husband would I make to her? Would I make every chippie who came my way? Could I be the head of a family without learning to control my sex desires?
I hadn't even known Lisa more than a couple of weeks, and already I considered myself in love with her. But I had slept with Ronnie since starting to go with Lisa. I had slept with Kelly Green.
And I knew that both times could have been avoided. It would have been so easy.
"Look, Ronnie," I could have said, "I'm tired and I'm in love with someone else, so why don't you leave me alone, huh?" So easy.
And I could have stopped the car on Market Street and said to Kelly, "Okay, this is where I'm dropping you. Have a good time at the movies."
I didn't play it that way, though. Both girls waved the bait at me, and I jumped.
Would it always be that way?
I didn't doubt that girls would go on being interested in sleeping with me after I married Lisa. If I married Lisa. Girls had always been more than willing to climb into the sack with me, and I saw no reason why that situation should change. But I would have to change. I had no right to marry Lisa and keep helling around.
How could I refuse, though?
Take Kelly. She disgusted me, as a person. Yet, all she had to do was pull down her pants and I would take her, right there in the car. When it came to sex I had no will-power-I was a slave to my desires. It would mean a life of pure hell for Lisa if I married her and kept on the way I was.
"Why so quiet?" Kelly asked.
"Thinking."
"Deep thoughts?"
"Nothing much," I said.
"Want me to tell you what you're thinking?"
"No."
"I'll tell you anyway. You're thinking you shouldn't have taken me to your place."
"Maybe I am," I admitted.
"You're worried about your Lisa. You think you should have been faithful to your sweetheart."
"Cut it out, Kelly."
"Let me tell you something, Jim. That girl's had as many guys as I have. Or more. Right now she's playing the Florence Nightingale bit, but don't let yourself get fooled into thinking she's a saint."
"You want to get out and walk from here?" I asked.
"I'm just warning you."
"Lisa's no virgin," I said. "I know that. Let's not talk about her any more."
"You love her, don't you?"
"Let's not talk about her any more," I repeated in a tone that made Kelly shut up.
Neither of us said anything until we were in Oakland. Then, as we wound through the quiet streets, I said, "Let me know when we're a block away."
"Next block, then."
I crossed the street and pulled up at the curb. "Okay. Out."
"Will I see you again?"
"Maybe."
"I mean in bed?"
I shrugged. "Who knows? I try to be decent. It isn't easy. You go home to Sam Andrews. He'll take care of you, Kelly."
"If he recovers."
"You'll find someone else if not," I said. "Come on, take off." I was annoyed with her now.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. You weren't in such a hurry to get rid of me a couple of hours ago."
She got out. As she walked away she gave me an extra-special wiggle treatment with her backside. I glared at her for a second, then swung the car in a U-turn and headed back the way I came.
I felt all tied up inside.
The taste of Kelly was on my lips, the smell of her in my nostrils. We had been intimate, really intimate. We had done some things I hadn't even done with Lisa. I regretted it all now. Kelly had a weapon to destroy me, I realized. She could tell Lisa all about her adventures tonight. She could describe me in detail.
I began to sweat. Kelly was perfectly capable of such a thing. She would tell Lisa just how many times we did it, tell her the positions, the sounds I had made. Lisa wouldn't be able to doubt the story.
And Lisa would come to hate me, because Lisa would see me for what I was-a stud without morals, a tomcat. Could I have done anything more repugnant to Lisa than to sleep with her father's mistress? No.
Lisa hated Kelly. And she would hate me for having let myself be seduced by Kelly.
I was in a thoroughly lousy mood as I pulled the car into a parking space and got out. Glancing up, I saw that the light was on in Ronnie's room, even though it was three in the morning. I was so keyed-up and worried that I half thought of dropping around to talk to her.
She cut me off-she asked the last question in the world I was expecting at that moment.
"Jim," she said, "was your mother a librarian?"
I let myself into my room. The scent of Kelly's perfume invaded everything. I could still see her sitting there, with those high pointed breasts showing, and the lush curves of her buttocks on display.
Scowling, I got undressed, tossed my clothes in the corner, and got into bed.
I closed my eyes. But I was too tired to sleep.
Instead, I fell into a kind of groggy half-doze. I was still in it, neither asleep nor awake, when the ringing of the telephone crashed into my brain.
I looked automatically at my watch. It said the time was ten past four.
I grabbed up the receiver.
"Hello?" I mumbled.
"Jim, this is Lisa."
I was instantly awake. Lisa's voice sounded as cold as ice. This was it, I thought-the finish. Kelly had told everything, and now Lisa was calling up to give me hell and break it off. What do you say in a case like that?
I said, "Is there something the matter, Lisa?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
The question came as such a whopping anti-climax that I almost broke out laughing. Here I was figuring to get my ears blistered for sleeping with Kelly Green, and Lisa wanted to know how my mother had earned her living.
At ten past four in the morning, yet.
I said, "Is this some kind of joke, baby?"
"I have to know. Was she a librarian, Jim?"
"Yes. Yes, she was. But-"
"In Philadelphia?"
"In Philadelphia," I agreed, still mystified. "If you'll only tell me what this is all-"
"Tell me her name, Jim," Lisa said in that same strange tone of voice. It sounded as though the call was coming from a million miles away. "Her name?"
"I've got to know it, Jim!" Fiercely.
I frowned. "Her name was Martha, Martha Collins. She died about four years ago."
There was a long silence at the other end of the wire.
"Lisa?" I said. "Lisa, would you mind telling me how come you feel like asking questions in the middle of the night?"
"I-I can't tell you over the phone," she said. "I've got to see you."
"Right now?"
"It can't wait."
I shook my head groggily. "Can't you at least give me a hint, Lisa?"
"It's got to be face to face. Meet me-" She hesitated a moment. "Meet me in Union Square. About an hour from now. Okay?"
"If you say so, Lisa. Who'll take care of your father, though?"
"Kelly's here in case anything happens. This is more important. I've got to talk to you, Jim. You don't know how awful this is."
"I wish-"
I was talking to a dead phone. Shaking my head, I put the receiver down. I was puzzled silly. Did this have some connection with my session with Kelly, I wondered? No, it didn't seem to. Why would Lisa give a damn about my mother's name? And how had she known that Mom was a librarian?
I felt worried. But I didn't know what to worry about. Why had she been so damned evasive on the telephone? Why couldn't she just come right out and tell me whatever she had to tell me?
Strange were the ways of womankind. Mine not to reason why, I figured.
I hauled myself out of the sack and started to get dressed. There went my Saturday of sleep, I thought bitterly. I had never been so tired in my life. Three rounds in the hay with Kelly, then an hour of driving, and then an hour of lousy half-sleep interrupted by a telephone call-I was so tired I felt sick. My throat was hoarse, my eyelids throbbed, my brain felt like it had been sandpapered. I just wanted to curl up somewhere and go to sleep.
But no. Lisa had mysteries to impart.
I shuffled out of the house and down into the predawn darkness. It was a cold, damp night. Fog had wrapped itself around the city, and wisps of it drifted past me. Far to the east, the first faint streaks of dawn were trying to cut through the foggy darkness.
I was so tired I couldn't even drive properly. I tried to go from first gear to second without hitting the clutch. The horrid screeching of the ground gears snapped me awake for a minute, and I shifted the right way. But then a minute later I came to a red light and braked the car to a halt without clutching. Naturally, I stalled out. The dashboard light winked mockingly at me and I stared back at it, wondering what the hell I had done wrong. After a moment it dawned on me. I started the car again and this time managed to get it going and keep it going without any more nonsense.
Union Square, at a little past five in the morning, was almost deserted. A couple of forlorn figures were sleeping on the benches. There was no sign of Lisa. I went across the street and found an all-night cafeteria. I went in.
The waitress on duty was around my age, tired-looking but still sexy. We were the only people in the place, and she looked at me hopefully, as though maybe there was a couch in the back room and she wouldn't mind if I gave her a quick tumble.
But I wasn't having any.
"Coffee," I said. "Black."
"Coming up." Her uniform was pretty thin and I could see nice pear-shaped breasts underneath it. At another time I probably would have taken her up on her unspoken offer. Not now, though. I wasn't in the mood. I was as much out of the mood as a living human male ever gets.
She kept on looking at me hopefully. She didn't stop until I got to the bottom of the coffee cup, put three nickels on the counter, and walked out.
Still no Lisa. And not much sign of dawn yet either. The fog was thick.
I settled down on a bench to wait.
Ten minutes later I saw a cream-colored Cadillac making its way along the north side of the park. Sam Andrews' car, I figured. I elbowed up, and started to walk as fast as I could.
Lisa got out of the car. Even by the poor light of the streetlamps, I could see how lousy she looked. She came running to me, and I took her in my arms.
She was shaking.
"Jim," she murmured. "Oh, Jim-"
"Tell me all about it," I whispered.
I took her hand and held it. Looking at the fingers, I was startled to see that she had bitten her nails to the quick, every one of them. Lisa had had such beautiful nails, long and polished. Now her fingers looked short and stubby, and she hadn't even filed her chewed-up nails. Something was very wrong.
We sat down on the nearest bench. Her eyes were red and raw-looking from crying. Her cheeks looked hollow, and she kept nibbling at her underlip.
"Now," I said. "Explain the quiz game."
"It's horrible," she said. "I hardly know how to tell you-"
"I'm going to blow my stack in a second if you don't cut the suspense routine, Lisa."
"All right. All right." She took a deep breath. "Your mother's name was Martha Becker, and she married a man named Len Collins. They lived in Philadelphia and had two children. She worked in the public library; he had a job with a publicity outfit. They had two children. First came a boy, and then two years later a girl. When they had been married six or seven years, they quarrelled badly and got divorced. Len Collins took the little girl and went west. His wife Martha stayed in Philadelphia with the little boy, and supported herself by working in the library. Am I right so far?"
"Where did you get all this?"
"Wait," she said. She wasn't looking at me now, but was staring off toward the big palm trees in the middle of the square. In the same million-miles-away voice she went on, "While you were growing up in Philadelphia, you never heard from your father or your sister. You practically forgot they existed. Maybe you did forget.
But they were still alive. They settled on the West Coast.
A sudden suspicion wandered through my mind. But no, I thought. It was too fantastic. My flesh began to creep.
Lisa went inexorably on. "Your sister grew up, started dating boys, all the rest. As for your father, he got into a little legal trouble in Los Angeles, so he came to San Francisco and went into the real estate business, and changed his name to-"
"No, Lisa I For the love of God, no!"
"-to Sam Andrews."
I felt as though someone had rammed a stiletto through my guts and hit me with a piledriver at the same time. I was weak and dizzy with shock and pain and disbelief. And an image went searing through my brain:
Myself naked, and Lisa naked. And the two of us joined in the bond of love. And my body moving on top of hers, my buttocks rising and falling, and Lisa's knees at either side of my body-
My sister.
I had slept with my sister.
I was in love with my sister.
"No," I said, shaking all over. "This can't be, Lisa. It's impossible. It-"
"What was your sister's name, Jim?"
I was floundering, now. I was drowning in my own shock.
"L-Lisa," I said.
"Lisa, my name. And my brother's name happened to be Jim. Lisa and Jim. Isn't that nice? Isn't that lovely? Jim and Lisa, brother and sister. I'm going to go out of my mind, Jim. I can't take it."
"When did you find out?" I asked numbly.
She gripped the bench with both hands. "About half an hour before I called you. The sedation wore off my father, and he woke up. He asked me what your name was again, and I said Jim Collins. And did you come from Philadelphia? Yes, I said, you did. And did you look familiar to me, he asked? No, I said, I couldn't place you. And then he asked me if I had slept with you."
"What did you tell him?" I asked.
"That I had," she answered. "I didn't see any point in pretending. I said yes, we were sleeping with each other, had been for a while."
"And?"
"And he made a little groaning sound. Then he started to tell me a little story. He let me in on the news that my name wasn't Andrews after all, that it had really been, Collins, but it had been changed when I was a little girl. He told me about my brother from Philadelphia, the brother named Jim that was two years older than I was. He pointed out how much you looked like a younger version of him-alike enough to be his own son."
"No," I said over and over, as though saying it often enough would make the whole nightmare unhappen. "No, no, no, no, no!"
"Yes," Lisa said. "He noticed the resemblance the moment you came in the door. And then when you told him your name, he wanted to flip. But he couldn't say anything, not then. And then he was put under sedatives. But he brought it ap as soon as he woke."
"What did you say?" I asked hoarsely.
"I told him it was all just a coincidence," she said, "that you must be some other Jim Collins. And he made me call you. He told me your mother's first name and that she had been a librarian, and he made me phone up at four in the morning and ask you. And you said-"
"Martha. A librarian."
"Yes. So you see, Jim-"
"I see. I see more than I ever wanted to see in my life. I see that I'm your brother. I see that you're my sister. I see that both our lives are messed up."
I put my head in my hands and sobbed. I was shattered, completely shattered. My mind went back over the nights Lisa and I had spent together-the times in my room, the trip to Muir Woods, the time in the car, the time in the park. Lisa's naked body joined to mine. Lisa's breasts in my hands. Lisa's buttocks and thighs. Lisa's loins responding to my touch, Lisa warming to me, Lisa opening to me.
Lisa. My sister, my mistress.
My beloved.
I was numb with shock.
"What are we going to do?" I asked. "What the hell are we going to do?"
"I've thought about it," she said. "There's only one thing we can possibly do. Forget each other."
"No."
"It has to be," she said firmly. "What we've done, it's against all the laws of society. Brother and sister sleeping together-no, h has to end. We've got to drop out of each other's lives completely. We have to wipe out of our minds everything that passed between us."
"I couldn't do that, Lisa."
"You have to. Forget every kiss, forget the times we made love, forget how good it was. Otherwise we'll be outcasts iii the world."
I looked at her in the early light of the new day. As tired as she looked, as haggard, she was still beautiful to me. Terribly, terribly beautiful.
But she was my sister, and the laws of God and man said I couldn't have her. We could live together in the same apartment as brother and sister and no one in the world would raise any objection. But if I approached her as man to woman, if I touched her breasts, if I lowered my body onto hers and took her-no, that was forbidden, unnatural, evil.
Why?
We had met as strangers. We had fallen in love. So what that we had shared the same parents? Why the taboo? What did it all mean? Why should we have to give each other up now?
"Lisa, I love you. I can't bear to lose you."
"I love you too, Jim. More than I ever dreamed I could love a man."
"Then why break it off?" I demanded. "If we love each other-"
"No. It's impossible."
"No one would know about it. Your name is Andrews, my name is Collins. We come from opposite ends of the country. No one could possibly know that-"
"My father knows, Jim. Our father."
"What of it?"
"You're being foolish. Do you think he'd stand by and let his children have a love affair? Or even get married? He'd stop us, Jim, and he'd be perfectly right to stop us. No, Jim. We've got to break up."
"Suppose he died," I persisted. "He's the only one who knows. If he died-"
"He's alive, Jim. And he's your father as well as mine. Don't talk that way."
"I can't think of him as my father, not after the way he deserted Mom. And you don't have much of a debt to him either, the way I look at it."
"Regardless, he's alive."
"But sick."
"He's alive," Lisa repeated firmly.
I nodded. He was alive. I found myself wishing he would die before morning, and then I pulled up short in horror. Lisa was right: he was my own father, and I had no right to wish his death, any more than I had any right to feel sexual lust for my sister.
"So that's the finish, is it?" I asked.
"I'm afraid so."
"Just like that. I had big plans for us, Lisa."
"They'll have to go on the shelf. We can't see each other any more. After I get into the car and drive away, you'll never see me again. I'm going to quit my job and find a new one. Maybe I'll go to a different city."
"I won't see you ever again? Not even as my sister? When your fa-our father dies, I'll be alone in the world except for you. A man's entitled to see his sister once in a while."
She shook her head. "This is a special case. If we saw each other, we'd be tempted. We'll never really learn to think of ourselves as brother and sister. There'll always be the pull of the flesh. So I think this had better be good-bye for keeps, Jim."
"Must it be?"
"It has to be. Be realistic? The world is against us.
So long as one other person knows-and someone does know-we don't stand a chance. Face it like a man. Just wipe me from my mind. You've been to bed with plenty of girls before me, and there'll be plenty afterward. There was nothing special about me."
"There was," I said. "Very speeial. I loved you."
"That has to end now."
She stood up, and drew her jacket tight at the throat. I could see the curves of her breasts, the contours of her hips and thighs, and there was a tight band of pain across my throat and belly.
"One last kiss?" I asked softly.
She hesitated. "Okay. One last kiss, Jim-a goodbye kiss."
I drew her toward me, put my arms around her. She gave me her cheek.
"No," I said. "Don't start being my sister until after this kiss. This is our good-bye kiss."
"It'll be harder for both of us, Jim."
"Please," I whispered.
She held back a moment, then turned to me and gave me her lips and her mouth.
It was a torrid kiss. Gradually she put her whole being behind it, and her loins churned against mine, and her breasts jabbed into my body, and our tongues met. I ached for her. Sister or no sister, I wanted her. Right there in Union Square, even.
But the kiss ended. She pulled away from me, looking shaken up, and I knew the kiss had stirred things inside her that she had vowed never to let stir again, "Good-bye, Jim."
"Lisa. I love you, Lisa-"
"You loved me," she corrected. "I loved you. Goodbye, Jim."
"Good-bye," I said.
I watched her walk away. The mist gradually closed in around her, and she got into the car, and a moment later I heard that big Cadillac engine rumble into life. I stood there staring until she drove away.
Then I went back to my own car. I turned it on and sat behind the wheel for a long while without trying to go anywhere.
I felt pole-axed.
I felt like hell.
My life had fallen apart in one hour flat, which was close to the record for the course. It wasn't even six in the morning yet.
And Lisa and I were through. I would never see her again.
Never see my beloved. My sister.
It was just seeping into me now, taking full hold. I kept seeing her naked before my eyes, kept visualizing the pointiness of her nipples, the curve of her buttocks. You aren't supposed to think of your sister in those terms, but this was a special case.
I still desired her. My body ached for her.
And I'd never see her again.
I put the car into gear, and moved out into the street, driving in a strange dream-like way without really knowing what I was doing. It was a miracle that I got home alive. I parked the car from memory alone and got out. I felt a little dizzy. The sun was coming up now.
Lisa, I thought desperately. Lisa, I love you. Lisa, it isn't so, I'm not your brother, I don't have any sisters at all!
But it was so. If I had never paid that visit to Sam Andrews on his sickbed, we might never have learned the truth. But I had gone, and he had recognized my name and my physique, and now the jig was up.
I bit down hard on my lip as the vision of Lisa's nakedness crept into my mind again.
Forget her, I thought. You've got to forget her.
I went into the house. I felt terribly alone, cut off from the entire world. I had to talk to someone. I had to spill the whole monstrous story out, or it would well up inside my brain and destroy me.
I took the stairs two at a time.
I knocked on Ronnie's door.
CHAPTER NINE
For a long moment there was no sound from Within. Then I heard Ronnie say sleepily, "Who is it?"
"Jim Collins."
Another long pause, then, "Is something the matter, Jim?"
"Yes," I said. "I've got to talk to somebody, Ronnie. It's important."
"Okay. Okay."
I heard bare feet padding across the floor. Then the door opened and a tired-looking Ronnie peered out at me. She was nude. I stared at the heavy rounds of her breasts, and the nipples looked up at me like two blind red eyes. Her short red hair was rumpled from sleep.
"Come in," she said.
As I closed the door behind me, she sank down heavily on the edge of her bed and sat there, shoulders slumped, breasts drooping forward. She didn't look more then half awake even now.
"I'm sorry to come bothering you," I said.
"What time is it?"
"Around six in the morning."
"Jesus. A girl never gets any sleep around here."
"I'm sorry," I said. "But there was a time when you came to me out of need. Now I'm coming to you. You said you'd return the favor if I needed it."
"You mean you want sex?"
"No," I said. "I just want someone to talk to. You can't imagine what I just got hit with. The worst possible news in the world."
"You were drafted," she said.
"I'd be glad to trade this for a draft call. No-" I said, "this is ten times worse, Ronnie. A thousand times worse."
"What happened?"
"You know the girl I was going with? Lisa-the one I was so much in love with?"
Ronnie nodded. "Something happen to her?"
I shook my head. "No. It happened to me. I just found out something about her. I found out that she's really my sister."
Ronnie looked up and blinked. "Huh?"
"My sister," I repeated.
Ronnie let out her breath in a long, slow whistle of disbelief. After a moment she rose and slowly crossed the room to the sink. Turning on the cold water, she bent over and splashed it in her face. I sat there, studying the supple lines of her back and the way her hips widened into her buttocks, and I looked at her as remotely as though she were a statue in the museum.
She straightened after a moment and dried her face. She seemed completely wide awake now.
"Tell me the story," she said. "How could a thing like that have happened?"
I told her. I started at the beginning and went right through to the things Lisa had told me an hour ago, and Ronnie listened to the recital without interrupting once. Finally I fell silent.
Ronnie murmured, "Nobody deserves a kick in the teeth from Fate like that. Nobody. I'm sorry for you, Jim. You must be going through hell right now."
"I held her in my arms," I said tonelessly, and pointed toward the ceiling. "Right up there. I kissed her all over. I touched her. I slept with her. And now-"
"You've got to start forgetting her," she said.
"How?"
"I can't tell you that. It'll take time-gradually it'll fade, the wound will heal. You'll find someone else to love. So will she."
"I want her," I said. "No substitutes."
"You can't have her."
"Why the hell not?" I asked. "Who's to stop us if we went away somewhere and got married? Her father-our father-he wouldn't come after us. And there's no one else."
"You just can't-"
"Why?"
"Anything could happen-"
"Such as?"
"Suppose you had a child," Ronnie said quietly.
I shrugged. "The kings of Egypt married their sisters all the time. There's been plenty of royal inbreeding in the world. What the hell, there's no insanity in our family. We're a healthy bunch. If we had kids they'd be as strong as I am, as good-looking as Lisa-"
"You're talking nonsense, Jim. You can't possible marry her-not your own sister-no matter how much you think you love her."
I looked down at the floor. After a long moment I said, "You're right, I suppose. But it's so hard to admit it, Ronnie. So goddamn hard."
"You'll get over it," she said.
"But what do I do in the meanwhile?"
"Try to forget."
I shook my head and thumbed my weary eyeballs. "I can't, I can't. Oh, Christ-I'm so tired, Ronnie, I just want to get some rest."
"Get undressed. Come to bed."
"I don't feel like having sex now."
"I didn't say anything about sex, Jim. Just come to bed. You need comforting; you don't want to be alone now. Just sleep here. When you wake, you'll feel a damned lot better, believe me."
She came over to me. I stood there like a puppet with his strings cut while she undressed me. Despite the fact that she was naked, despite the fact that the tips of her breasts kept grazing me as she undressed me, despite the fact that in another moment I was naked too, I felt no desire for her. I was drained of sex. I just wanted to curl up somewhere and never wake.
Ronnie took me by the hand and led me to the narrow bed. She switched off the light. We got into bed together. She stroked my hair, and pressed my head against her breasts. The big plump hillocks were so soft, so warm, so sweet-smelling.
"Sleep," she murmured. "It's the best remedy for any kind of trouble."
I nodded and closed my eyes. I burrowed up against her breasts, burying my face in the valley between those two huge, fleshy rounds. Ronnie continued to stroke my hair, slow and easy, slow and easy.
I dropped off into sleep.
It was a sleep full of nightmares-but at least it was sleep.
I awoke many hours later. At first I didn't know where I was or who I was sleeping with. Then I reached out and my hand closed over a breast-a big breast, firm but resilient, filling my entire hand. Ronnie's breast.
I remembered.
I remembered the painful scene with Lisa, and I remembered coming there to be comforted by Ronnie. All the sorrows of the world descended on me again. I felt the blackness of complete despair.
Ronnie's body moved against mine.
Suddenly despair gave way to lust. I was alone in the world, and wanted desperately to be part of someone else. I couldn't have the person I wanted, but there was a substitute right there. I brought my other hand down on Ronnie's body and, without opening my eyes, began to stir her. One of her breasts was near my lips, and I kissed it.
"Yes," she whispered. "Go ahead, if that's what you want. I want you to be happy."
I turned to her. Her big body was soft and warm beneath mine. I felt her hand roaming me, guiding me to her. I took her.
Our bodies moved slowly in rhythm. I still hadn't opened my eyes: I was reaching out in blind lustfulness, in animal-like need for physical comfort. And Ronnie comforted me. Everything was soft and warm and moist and slippery, and it was good, so very good. I moved up and down, up and down, and the placid bulk of Ronnie was there to receive me, riding with every thrust, answering with one of her own. Soon I felt the tingling excitement, the twitch of sensation. I knew that Ronnie wasn't ready yet, but in my present state of confusion and despair I couldn't stop to consider her feelings.
"I've got to," I said. "Right now."
"All right. Go ahead. I don't mind."
"Maybe I can wait-"
"No. Go on."
She was smarter than I was: I couldn't wait. My need was too compelling. It swelled and swelled, then it burst, in a frenzy of sudden action. Ronnie held me tight while I was making it over the top. Her strong arms were clasped around my back, and I felt the double bulk of her breasts cushioning me, and for just a moment the world was good again.
Then, when it was over, I rested for a little while, pillowing against her breasts without separating our bodies. I waited until I had my balance again, then I started to glide back and forth.
"You don't have to," Ronnie said.
"I want to. It's only fair."
"You need your rest," she said.
"I believe in giving as good as I get," I insisted.
So I moved, and she moved with me and this time I was able to bring her along with me. I felt good about that. The first time, I had simply been using her. She had made herself into a convenient receptacle where I could deposit my gloom. But I don't like using women that way. So the second time around, I made up for it.
Again we rested for a while. I began to feel a little better about things.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Around two in the afternoon."
"So we've slept away the whole day."
"You needed it," she said softly.
I realized that for the last few hours, at least, she hadn't been sleeping. She had just been lying here holding me, keeping me warm, fending off loneliness for me while I slept. That was damned fine of her. I thought.
"We might as well get up," I said.
"If you want."
We got out of bed. Ronnie slipped a robe on and went down the hall to take a shower.
Leaving me alone was a mistake. The moment the door closed, the darkness closed in on me again. I thought of Lisa, off in Oakland taking care of her sick father, the sick father who had thrown the monkey wrench into the works. What was Lisa thinking about today? Did she miss me as much as I missed her? Maybe Kelly Green had told her all about last night's exploits with me. In that case Lisa might not regret a thing. She might even be glad to have gotten rid of me before it was too late.
A few moments later Ronnie returned to the room. She peeled off the bathrobe and tossed it to me with a cheerful grin.
"Here," she said. "Your turn. Nice cool shower will freshen you up."
I took the robe from her. She looked pink and well-scrubbed, and a few droplets of water still gleamed on her naked skin. I slipped on the robe. It fit me pretty well, though it ended near my knees. It was still moist from Ronnie's body, and there was a kind of sensuous thrill about that.
"I'll fix breakfast while you're showering," she told me.
She was right that the shower made me feel better. I stood under water as cold as I could stand it, and the blade of icy water surgically slashed away the pain of last night, the bitter shock. I was almost in a good mood when I got out. But it didn't last long-there was always the memory of Lisa sliding back into my mind, and the clammy fist of lovesickness tightening around my heart.
I pushed open the door. There was the smell of frying bacon on the hotplate. Ronnie handed me a glass of orange juice.
"Do you good," she said.
I gulped it down. She gestured me into a chair, and served breakfast-all the comforts of home. She was really going out of her way to make me feel relaxed and at ease.
But I realized I was imposing. I had barged in on, her at six in the morning, and it was mid-afternoon and I was still there. I couldn't do that. I had to get away, to go off somewhere by myself and think things through. It was too easy to slip into a dependency on this big, good-natured girl.
Ronnie said, "After you've eaten, maybe we can go for a drive somewhere."
"No," I said. "You've got your own life to live. I've taken up enough of your time today."
"Don't be an idiot."
"I mean it," I insisted. "I've got to figure everything out by myself. You've been great, Ronnie. But I can't sit around here letting you cheer me up."
She tried to talk me out of it, but I wouldn't be talked. I told her that she would have to let me go off on my own, and after a while she gave in. So I kissed her, in a friendly kind of way, and got dressed, and went upstairs to my own apartment.
I shaved and changed my clothes. I didn't want to stay around the apartment There was too much of the odor of sex in it. There were too many memories: memories of Kelly Green lying on her belly with her bare buttocks wriggling in the air, memories of Ronnie, and above all, memories of Lisa. Lisa naked, her eyes sparkling, her body alive with desire. Lisa tingling in my arms. Lisa gasping with pleasure, Lisa pistoning her hips, Lisa with her dark hair tumbling over my face, Lisa with her breasts firm against my hands.
Lisa.
Lisa.
Memories of Lisa everywhere. Lisa haunted me.
I got the devil out of the building and started walking toward Market Street, where there would be some sign of life on a Saturday afternoon. I didnf know what to do with myself, now that I was alone. I didn't know where the hell I was heading today. Just walking.
I crossed Montgomery, where the stockbrokers have their offices, passed the big, solid-looking bank buildings, and cut up the hill and down the other side. When I got to Market I found a bar and stopped in for some quick refreshment. You sometimes meet interesting people in bars, and right now I wanted to meet people.
No luck. I had a vodka martini and sat hunched by myself drinking it. The television set was on and everybody in the bar was all wrapped up in the ball game. The Giants were playing the Dodgers, and you'd think that game was the most important thing in the world.
"What's the score?" I asked the bartender.
"2-0 Giants. He's pitching a no-hitter in the sixth."
I nodded without even asking who "he" was, finished my drink, and cleared out.
What did all those baseball fans care about my troubles? Had they ever fallen in love with their sisters? Probably not. And all they gave a damn about was a bunch of highly-paid, overage adolescents who spent their working days slamming a little ball around a field.
I walked three blocks. I found myself in front of a movie theater. Without even looking at the titles on the marquee, I put down my buck and walked in.
The first picture was a crime story. I didn't pay any attention to it. I just sat there letting the black and white images flicker past my eyes. In a way it was soothing, like being hypnotized. But one of the characters in the film had a beautiful sister, and every time she wandered into the plot I felt a little jab of anguish deep down in my belly.
The second picture was a western. I watched about an hour of it, gave up in disgust, and went outside. Night was starting to fall. I passed a newsstand at the corner and the headline announced, "DODGERS 3, GIANTS 2." So much for what's-his-name and his no-hitter. I was glad that all those eager barflies had had their fun spoiled.
I walked on.
I felt hungry and lonely.
Lisa, I thought. Lisa, where are you? Lisa, what are you thinking about?
Lisa, do you miss me?
Lisa, will you come back to me?
She had said we must never see each other again. Would she back down? Maybe the sick man would die. Then nobody in the world would stand between us. Which is worse, I wondered-to sleep with your sister, or to wish for your father to die?
But he wasn't really my father, I thought, except for the accident of having given me life: he hadn't raised me; he hadn't taught me how to bait a hook and how to throw a football; he had run away and left me, and blotted me from his mind for almost twenty years. Was that a father? Did I owe him any love and respect? For what-having knocked up my mother?
And was Lisa really my sister? Sure, in the sense that we had the same parents. But we hadn't been raised together-we weren't kin in that sense. We had met as strangers. We had embarced as lovers. It could have gone on that way, and no one would have been the wiser.
Lisa, I thought again, longing for her.
This day wasn't turning out to be a success after all. I should have stayed with Ronnie, I realized. She was kind; she was comforting. Instead I was out here wandering on my own, getting bluer and bluer with each passing moment, and doing myself no good at all.
I stopped in another bar. I put away two vodka martinis.
They didn't help. Not one goddamn bit.
A girl tried to pick me up. I'm being charitable when I call her a girl. She was about forty and hadn't been in her prime since Truman was in the White House. Her hair was a phony red, her eyelashes were long and fake; her lipstick was smeared.
"Give you a good time," she whined.
"Go to hell."
"You don't have to be that way about it!" she said indignantly. "You lousy pansy!"
She walked away. I felt sorry for her. I shouldn't have been so blunt. She was a human being, wasn't she? She had troubles of her own. I could have refused politely and not hurt her.
I had another vodka martini.
I was starting to get maudlin, now. Another minute and I'd be crying all over the counter.
I wanted Lisa fiercely.
Suddenly, feeling very lonely and more than a little drunk, I got the bright idea of calling Lisa and trying to talk her into changing her mind about our breaking up. I figured that maybe in the twelve hours or so since I had seen her, she had come to miss me, and she would back down. It wasn't a smart thing to call, of course. I couldn't have hoped to get anywhere. But I was too drunk to think that out. I dropped nickels in the slot and dialed her father's Oakland number.
The phone rang at the other end. Once, twice, three times.
I came to my senses. I realized I was a damn fool for calling-I had no business bothering her. She had been right that we had to stay away from her, and I was making it harder for both of us this way.
But I couldn't put down the phone. The hope of hearing Lisa's voice again triumphed over common sense in me.
Four rings. Five.
Then someone picked up.
"Hello?" the voice said.
I sighed in relief. It wasn't Lisa who had answered the phone.
"Hello, Kelly," I said. "This is Jim."
CHAPTER TEN
She seemed a little surprised that I had called. We exchanged some small talk and then she said, "Hey, you and Lisa have a fight or something?"
"Why?"
"She's been acting peculiar all day. Won't talk to anybody. In a real bitchy mood. I mentioned your name and she almost bit my head off."
I said, "We broke up."
"Huh?"
"You heard me. We broke up."
"When did all this happen? It was past two in the morning when I left you."
"Lisa called me at four," I said. "We met downtown and talked it all over. We aren't seeing each other any more."
"How do you like that?" Kelly asked. "So why'd you call up, then?"
"To talk to you," I lied glibly.
"Oh. Uh-huh. Well, you got me."
"What are you doing today?"
"Nothing much. Moping, I guess."
"Meet me in the city?" I don't know why I said it, except that I was tired of being alone.
"You really want me to?"
"Yes."
"Okay," she said. "I'll take a bus in. Where are you, anyway?"
I told her. She said, "Okay. Give me around an hour, huh?"
"Right"
"You sure you don't want to talk to Lisa?"
"Positive," I said. I paused a moment, then added. "How's her father?"
"No better, no worse. The doctor's been here a couple of times. They don't know if hell ever get out of bed again. Well, look-I'll see you soon, okay?"
"Yeah," I said, and put down the phone.
I was glad I hadn't had to talk to Lisa. That was dumb, calling up like that. But I wondered what was the sense of seeing Kelly. Here I had turned down the offer of a kind, good girl like Ronnie to spend the day with her, and instead I was spending it with someone I didn't give a damn about, someone who was good for nothing except sex.
Well, I was committed.
I wandered around a little while longer. Then I went over to the place where Kelly was supposed to meet me and waited for her bus.
She showed up a little ahead of time. She was dressed simply, just an ordinary blouse and skirt. But she was wearing those silly platform pumps again, and the glittering beehive of her hair stood up tall.
She slipped her hand through mine. "What are we going to do, lover?"
"I don't know. Let's go out on the town. I'm in a lousy mood."
"On account of Lisa?"
"On account of Lisa," I said.
Kelly grinned. "I'll help you forget her. What kind of place you want to go to?"
"A place where I'll have a good time."
"I know some pretty raw places," she said. "Want to try one of them?"
"The rawer the better," I said.
She laughed. "You don't know what you're letting yourself in for," she said.
We got onto a bus and headed up to North Beach. You know North Beach-it's the Bohemian section of San Francisco, like Greenwich Village, only a whole lot shabbier. Kelly was taking me to some sort of beatnik joint. Well, in my present mood that was perfectly okay.
It was a dingy basement place on some dingy back street way the hell and gone above Chinatown. By the dim light of a few 40-watt bulbs I saw travel posters and abstract paintings on the walls. The other patrons were fifty-fifty divided into two groups: half beard-and-blue-jeans beatniks, and half dressed-to-the-nines slummers with money.
"You come here often?" I asked.
"With Sam, yes. He liked the show here."
"What kind of show is it?"
"You'll see," she said.
A girl came over to take our orders. She looked like she was about seventeen. She wore no makeup and she wore no bra. Her young pointed breasts were visibly moving around under her polo shirt, and I could see the little nubs of her nipples.
"What'll you have?" she asked, as though she didn't give a damn if we had anything.
I looked at Kelly. She said, "Wine. A bottle of white wine. Okay with you?"
"Sure," I said.
The girl brought us a tall bottle of chilled California white wine. We sat there drinking it.
"Want to tell me about what went wrong with you and Lisa?" Kelly asked.
"No."
"Get it off your chest?"
"No," I said. "I don't feel like talking about it, you hear me?"
"Okay. Okay."
"What time does the show start?"
"First show's at ten," Kelly said.
I looked at my watch. Half past nine. I fidgeted. I didn't really want to be here, in this dim smoky dump: I wanted to be with Lisa, alone on a desert island somewhere where the world couldn't wag fingers of scorn at us for our love.
I drank wine.
I watched the minutes tick away.
I played footsie with Kelly, and she played footsie back at me, and she winked at me and grinned and otherwise acted like she owned me.
Then at ten o'clock sharp the dim lights went out altogether, and a spotlight went on at one end of the long room. The show was about to start.
I wasn't really prepared for the sort of show it was. I mean, I didn't think they had things like this in the United States. Three people came out and stood blinking into the spotlight-two girls and a guy.
The guy was black. And I mean coal-black. He was a big, handsome Negro about six feet five, with a body rippling with muscles. His purplish-black skin looked as though it had been oiled. It gleamed in the spotlight as he stood there, flashing dazzling white teeth at the audience and waiting patiently. He looked spectacular, a real king of the jungle.
The girl to his left was white. She was a blonde, about medium height, and very young, maybe only nineteen or twenty. She was built. She wore a rhinestone-studded bikini that just barely held back the overflowing abundance of her breasts. Her thighs were big and solid, and her buttocks, almost completely bare where the bikini bottom slanted up sharply, were plump and pink and squeezable.
The girl on the other side of the big buck looked like she was Chinese. She was slim and willowy, very fragile, like a little porcelain doll. She, too, wore only a bikini, and it was easy to see she wasn't hiding much. Her breasts were very small, her limbs thin. But she had a kind of pixy beauty about her that contrasted nicely with the lavish fleshiness of the other girl.
Black, white, yellow-International Night.
The United Nations of sex was about to hold a session of the General Assembly.
The three of them stood there, nodding politely to the scatter of applause. For a moment I thought they were dancers or acrobats or something.
Then there was the sputter of a sound system coming to life, and music filtered into the room. Chamber music, a string quartet; it was delicate, refined music, maybe a Mozart minuet. In view of what was going to happen in another minute, the music was weirdly out of place, and whoever thought up that little touch must have been a very peculiar kind of guy.
The two girls turned to the big black buck.
I blinked. I had expected the show to be raw, but not this raw. He grinned broadly as he stood there in all his massive masculinity. He had a pretty fantastic kind of body, too. With one big hand he reached out and pulled the blonde's halter off.-Her heavy breasts tumbled into the open, the nipples standing up tall. Then he took the halter off the little Chinese girl, and her little pointed breasts were bare. Then off came the bikini bottoms. All three were naked.
I held my breath and gripped my wine-glass tightly.
The black boy took a stand at one side of the stage, firm as an oak, with his legs a little apart. The Chinese girl went to the other side of the stage, came running across, and left the ground in a running leap.
He caught her.
She landed on him like coming down on a spike. He held her, her slim yellow legs encircled his body, and he laughed in animal pleasure as she started to move in place. At the same time the blonde girl came over and knelt in front of them. While he took the Chinese, she caressed him with her fingers. After a few minutes of that, he caught her by the hair, lifted her to her feet, and started to play with her breasts. She went around behind him and pressed her body against his, moving from side to side.
Then the Chinese girl started to gasp and moan, and to move faster and faster. The threesome formed a strange tableau as they went into high speed. Suddenly he dumped the Chinese girl off and, turning, pounced on the blonde. She lay spread-eagled beneath him, her pale whiteness vivid against the inky blackness of him. The Chinese girl, not yet satisfied, threw herself on the top of the heap. All three scrambled around madly, arms and legs and breasts and buttocks sticking out here and there.
Then somehow he was back with the Chinese, but his busy hands were showing the blonde a good time. I heard him bellow with pleasure after maybe ten minutes went by. He rolled off, and with a big grin stretched out on his back.
The Chinese now crept over his prone body, looking like a child against his hugeness. She crouched on all fours on his belly. I watched as she put her lips to him and restored his vitality. In an astonishingly short time he was ready to go again.
And so were they.
Again they tangled, and it was hard to tell who was doing what to whom. The scene became torridly steamy. I saw him switching back and forth from one girl to another, giving an incredible display of virility as he brought first one, then the other to a climax and left her gasping for breath. He took them in every position under the sun, frontways, backways, sideways, upside down. Fantastic. Unbelievable.
After the act had been going on maybe twenty-five minutes, he showed some sign of needing a rest. I don't know how many times he had had each girl by now, but even he was getting to need a breather. But there wasn't any intermission. Oh, no-you bet your life there wasn't. The big lad just ambled over to the side of the stage and sat down to rest, while the blonde and the Chinese carried on without him.
They knew all the tricks. They hugged each other, and then the Chinese took one of the blonde's big breasts in her mouth, while the blonde carressed the Chinese's slim buttocks. Their bodies intertwined, and they started to move, back and forth, in an exciting friction that must have been almost as good as the real thing to them. I had never seen a lesbo act before. It was a creepy thing to watch-two women with handfuls of each other's breasts, and then going down on each other, face to feet, and busy tongues sending darts of fire through quivering bodies. Gasps of pleasure were bursting from their lips.
Now they were both groaning in delight, "Oh-ah, oh-ah, oh-ah," and their bodies were all knotted up, white against yellow, voluptuousness against skinniness, east against west, and I stole a glance at Kelly and saw her watching in fascination, her eyes wide.
I nudged her. "How long does this show go on?"
"Couple of hours."
"They can't hold out that long!"
"The audience helps out," she said.
I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but I found out soon enough. The lesbian routine ended with both girls exhausted and flattened out on stage. Now the colored boy was ready for another round, but both girls shook him off, He looked toward the audience.
And a girl got up from one of the tables and came toward him, taking off her clothes as she went.
She was a full-bodied kid in her teens, one of the beatniks. Off came her sweater and jeans, and there was nothing on underneath, and she flattened herself against the giant Negro and gave herself to him, right in front of everybody. He took her standing up, lifting her off the ground and wrapping her legs around him, and I watched as her full buttocks rose and fell rhythmically, pointed right at me.
Then a tall fellow with a beard came out of the audience and picked up the Chinese girl. She had regained her enthusiasm, it seemed, and soon there were two couples going at it on stage.
Which left one girl, the blonde, somewhat out of things.
But not for long.
Now there was what looked like a full-scale orgy under way on stage. Three couples were writhing in complete nudity. And I looked around me and saw others going at it right at their tables.
Kelly reached for me. Passionately.
I felt her hands clutching me. She wriggled around the table, unzipped me. Her eyes looked wild in the darkness; her face was flushed.
The spotlight went out.
The room was dark. It was every man for himself now, in the wildest scene I had ever made.
Kelly settled down in my lap and flounced her skirt out around us. She had nothing underneath. I felt the warmth of her thighs and buttocks as she pressed downward, imprisoning me within her body. Eagerly, I found the buttons of her blouse and opened them. No bra, either. The ripe hills of her breasts rose to my touch.
I pistoned my hips upward, going into her as deep as I could. She began to gasp. As she threshed around wildly, she knocked the wine bottle to the floor. No loss-it was empty anyway.
I buried my face in her breasts and moved the lower half of my body with growing urgency. I felt her quivering, throbbing, palpitating.
I began to make little throaty sounds. So did she. We were both caught up in the wild fervor of the moment, carried away.
It was a real orgy now.
I caught my breath and closed my eyes and felt passion sweep over me, and in the same moment it hit Kelly too, and we throbbed in unison, and there was the long indrawn sigh of completion.
Then I held her tight, while my body ebbed back to normal.
Now that it was over, I looked around. My eyes were accustomed to the darkness. I saw couples everywhere-on the floor, on tabletops, in the seats. A spectacular display of sex. Next table over, a wild-eyed girl with gigantic breasts was hugging a beefy fellow with a beard. Beyond them, two scared-looking teenagers were imitating what they saw all around. Beyond them, a well-dressed woman was lifting her skirt to reveal the pale pink globes of her buttocks to anyone and everyone.
I shrugged Kelly off my lap.
"Come on," I said. "Let's get out of here."
"But-"
"Out of here. Fast."
We made our way over the prostrate bodies, reached the door, burst into the fresh air. Kelly led me through the long basement passageway and out into the street. I staggered toward a lamppost and grabbed it, holding on tight while sanity returned.
"Jesus Christ," I said.
"Some place, huh?"
"I never dreamed it would be like that."
"I said it was raw."
"Raw can mean a lot of things. Is it always like that?"
"Never really so wild. Tonight was a corker."
"Yeah," I said. "You can't find stuff like that in Paris, I bet."
"You can in Mexico," she told me. We started down the street. "Some of the border cities. I went there with Sam last year. We-"
"Skip it," I said. "I'd just as soon not know, if it's okay with you."
"Whatever you like."
I felt dazed. To think that things like that were going on right here in California, that the police didn't know that the most sordid kind of sex was practiced in public-
I felt very far from Lisa at that moment. There was a kind of purity about Lisa that made a place like that alien to her Lisa would never have gone there. Lisa would never have been carried away by such a frenzy.
Lisa would never have-
Stop thinking about her, I ordered.
As easy as turning off the moon. Lisa filled my mind. I wanted Lisa.
But I had Kelly instead.
"Where to now?" Kelly asked hoarsely.
"That's it. I've had it."
"But it's still early."
"Sorry," I said. "Enough's enough." My mind was full of the image of churning bodies, heaving thighs, swaying breasts.
"What's the matter?" she asked mockingly. "Too raw for you?"
"Maybe."
"You didn't strike me as the prissy type last night," she said.
"That was different."
"Let's go to your place," she said. "I don't want to go back yet."
"No."
"I want to."
I shook my head. But it was a losing battle-Kelly wanted me, and I didn't know how to refuse. So we went to my place.
We closed the door and we stripped down to the buff, and we climbed into the hay.
I let Kelly take the lead. She crawled all over me, her lips moving constantly. It wasn't long before I was ready. I cupped her breasts and pulled her toward me. She straddled me and I took her. Round two of the night, I thought.
But not the last round. Oh, no, not by a long shot.
Not with Kelly, insatiable Kelly. She saw to it that I stayed ready for action all night. Again and again we threw our bodies at each other. She didn't satisfy easily: one culmination was just the prelude to the next. I began to feel groggy from too much sex. Her breasts and buttocks became so much meaningless meat to me.
Finally she let me alone. It was almost dawn, and the room was a mess. She pillowed my head on her breasts and I closed my eyes.
And dreamed of my lost Lisa.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I had a rough time of it the next week. Lisa didn't show up for work on Monday. Not that I dared to go over to Personnel myself. I was trying hard to keep our agreement not to see each other. But my buddy, Dick Lewicki, went over there to straighten out something about his withholding tax, and when he came back he said to me, "Hey, your girl Lisa isn't in today."
"Yeah?"
"They told me she was sick." Lewicki grinned and leered at me. "Morning sickness?"
I exploded. I wheeled on him and grabbed his collar, bunching it tight so his face reddened.
"Shut your goddamn filthy mouth!" I barked at him. "I ever hear you make a crack like that again, I'll knock your head off, you stinking Polack!"
Lewicki goggled at me. "Let-go-my-throat, Jim-"
I let go of him. "You hear what I said?"
"Sure," he said hoarsely, rubbing his throat. "Sure. Jeez, Jim, I was only kidding around-"
"That's a hell of a subject to kid around about!"
"Christ, you're a touchy one today."
"I'm in a lousy mood. Don't bug me, you hear? Just don't bug me."
So Lewicki went away and didn't bug me. Nobody else bugged me either. Word got around that I was keyed up and snarling at people, and so people stayed away from me. I felt bad about having grabbed Lewicki by the throat that way. It wasn't his fault, I told myself. How was he supposed to know he had hit me on a raw nerve? He was just being smutty in a good natured way, no offense meant. He never dreamed I would blow up on him like that.
Lisa didn't come to work on Tuesday.
Lisa didn't come to work on Wednesday.
On Thursday, I got up guts enough to walk over to Personnel and ask for her. There was a new secretary there, a mousy little strawberry blonde who looked at me as though I were a stick of wood, and said, "Yes?"
"I'm looking for Lisa Andrews," I said. "The secretary here."
"I'm sorry. There's no Lisa Andrews here."
"She was Mr. Donatelli's secretary."
"She left last week," the girl said primly. "I'm the new secretary. Is there something I can do for you?"
"No," I said. "No, nothing."
I started to turn away. A voice from behind me said, "Collins. Collins, wait a minute."
I looked around. Donatelli, the Personnel Manager. He was waving me back into my office.
"Would you step into my office for a moment, Collins?"
I followed him in. He settled down behind his desk, a neat, dapper, executive-looking man.
"You're looking for Lisa?" he asked me. "That's right, sir."
"I figured you of all people would have known where she was," he said.
"You mean you don't know?"
"All I know is that she phoned up Monday morning and said she was quitting. Didn't give notice or anything. That's very unusual for a girl like Lisa, you know. She has a powerful sense of responsibility. She wouldn't be the sort to leave us in the lurch like this without some extraordinary reason."
"Well, sir, her father had a stroke on Friday," I said. "He's pretty badly paralyzed."
"And she's taking care of him?"
"That's right, sir."
"But that still doesn't explain why she'd quit without notice, without offering an explanation." He gave me the eagle eye and said, "She isn't in any sort of trouble, is she, Collins?"
"Trouble?"
"You know what I mean."
"I'm afraid I don't."
His cheeks quirked. "Don't you know what it means to say a girl is in trouble, Collins?"
I looked straight at him. "Yes, sir."
"And you and Lisa were dating. We all knew that."
"Yes, sir."
"And if I ask you whether she's in trouble-whether you got her in trouble-"
I shrugged. "I know where you're heading. The answer is no. So far as I know, nothing like that happened."
"She's a very wonderful girl, Collins. I'd hate to see her suffer."
"I think you ought to know that we broke up," I said. "On Saturday-so I don't know any more about what's going on than you do. I think she may have quit so she wouldn't have to see me again. Is there anything else, Mr. Donatelli?"
He sighed. "No, Collins."
I walked out.
I was annoyed by the way everybody assumed I had knocked Lisa up. And Donatelli's interest seemed more than just a business interest. It occurred to me that maybe he had had ideas about her. Most likely had dated her, and probably even had slept with her. It wasn't unheard of for young executives to sleep with their secretaries, after all. And then an uncouth young technician-me-comes along and takes her away and she falls in love with him. All of a sudden it's p-f-f-f-t, and Lisa is gone. I couldn't blame Donatelli for being curious, under those circumstances.
The hellish week wore on.
I was living a hermit's life. I didn't dare call Kelly Green, because I was afraid of getting Lisa on the phone by accident. And for some reason Ronnie was keeping away. I gathered that she was busy with someone else. Some nights I heard laughter from below, and I knew she was having friends staying over.
I felt kind of left out of the universe.
I didn't even see friends from the lab. I would come home and have a lonely pizza pie on the corner, then go up to my room and read or drink some wine until around ten o'clock, and then I would get into bed and toss and turn for a while, and finally fall asleep. That week I did a lot of reading and a lot of drinking and a lot of sleeping. Alone. It was the lousiest week of my life.
Then Saturday came, and I didn't know what to do with myself for the whole weekend. I missed having the lab to go to. At least that kept me busy from nine to five. But now I had a whole Saturday, and Sunday too.
I sat down and had a long talk with myself.
I told myself that it was time for me to stop horsing around. I had to forget Lisa and find myself a new girl. Either that or crack up completely, and I didn't want that to happen. There was no sense mooning about Lisa. It was absolutely impossible for me ever to have her again. I just had to forget her.
Easier said than done.
I foozled away half of Saturday by going through my electronics magazines and clipping out articles I wanted to keep, throwing the rest away. Then I went down to Ronnie's place, but she wasn't home. So I went out.
I took another long walk.
I ended up in the downtown section around half past six. I had some beers and one of those foot-long frankfurters, and then I killed some time listening to a political speech on a street corner, and then I picked up a girl.
She was listening to the speech too. It was a real fiery speech, all about how we should pull out of the United Nations and drop hydrogen bombs on Russia right away. Everybody seemed to be cheering and applauding. But I noticed this girl cheering all the wrong things, and booing when the rest were applauding, and since I felt pretty much the same way about the things the speaker was saying, I smiled at her and she smiled back.
She was around twenty, I figured. Cute. Short, with an upturned nose and a sunny smile and blue eyes and straw-colored hair, cut very short. Her jacket was open and I saw nice breasts pushing against her sweater. We started to talk, and pretty soon we lost interest in the speech, and I said, "Let's go get a drink somewhere," and she said, "That's a swell idea."
So we had a drink, and then we had dinner together at a little hamburger place. Her name was Peggy and she came from Pittsburgh and she went to college over in Berkeley. She was a pacifist and she had been on Freedom Rides and she had picketed the Un-American Affairs Committee and sent letters to Washington demanding the end of bomb tests-a really active chick.
We talked, and I came on like a columnist for the New York Times, and pretty soon she was seeing me as a very wise observer of the political scene, which I wasn't. But I was five years older than she was, and that in itself impressed her more than anything. You know how it is when you're 20. Anyone else under 25 is just one of your equals. Anybody over 35 is a member ol the older generation, so of course can't understand a thing about the way the world is really like. But anybody 25 and 35 is young enough to be modern but old enough to be experienced in the ways of the world, and that was the age-group that got the most respect.
So we talked politics, which was a brand new line for me. And then after a while I was able to say, "Why don't we go up to my place and finish the discussion?"
"Okay," she said.
"And we'll pick up a bottle of some refreshments on the way."
"Okay," she said again.
We got a fifth of gin and a sixpak of tonic and went to my place. At first she was all seriousness, but as the gin and tonic went to work on her she began to loosen up. For a while she was sitting with her knees in the air, her skirt dropping away to show me her thighs, and then a little while later I had the skirt off her-and the slip and the blouse and the bra too.
She looked like a scared little girl. But she soon perked up. She had good breasts-not big, but well shaped-and a nice body, with flaring hips and sweet biteable buttocks.
As I took my clothes off she said, "I really don't do very much of this sort of thing, you know."
I smiled at her as though to say, "Yes, my child, I understand perfectly. You're Not-That-Sort-Of-Girl-At-All-but you'll make an exception just this once because you like my politics and because you've had too much gin.
In my condition of loneliness I wasn't too fussy. So I settled down on the bed with her and touched her thighs, spreading them a little. The pale whiteness of her body gleamed up at me.
I gently pushed my way in.
She made a little sighing sound, half fear, half pleasure. She didn't seem to be a virgin, but she hadn't had a hell of a lot of experience either I didn't try to enter her all the way. I could tell she wasn't built for the full treatment.
Shy and inexperienced, she was-but frigid, she wasn't. In a little while she was gasping and wriggling up against me, trying to take more of me than she could hold, and then she came to a nice little climax. I rode with her a way, led her to a second climax, and had my own. That second one surprised her. I don't think she expected it. Most likely the two or three college boys who comprised her sex experience up till now hadn't been able to bring that trick off. So I had shown her something important tonight-that she was more passionate than she knew.
Now that I had had her, though, I quickly got tired of her. She wanted to stay the night, to do it again and again. But I wiggled out.
"I'll drive you back to Berkeley," I said.
We had some drinks for the road. Then she dressed, and I dressed, and we headed out into the night. I drove her over to Berkeley, let her off in a street near the campus, and she kissed me goodnight and goodbye and marched away.
Hail and farewell.
It hadn't been such a bad evening. My loneliness was gone, at least for a moment or two, and so was the sexual tension that had been building up in me. And I had pleasant memories of soft pink buttocks and neat little pointed breasts, and of a girl gasping in new pleasures. No, not a bad evening at all.
But not much of a substitute for Lisa.
A couple of more days slipped by. Lousy days. I didn't know how to get from one hour to the next.
Sunday night I saw Ronnie for the first time in a week. We sat around talking for a while. But she wasn't in the mood for sex-wrong time of the month-so I went to bed alone. She was going out of town for a week or two, she told me-she had an engagement to sing folk songs in a Los Angeles night club. I told her I'd miss her, which wasn't any lie, and she kissed my cheek and smiled at me.
Monday.
Tuesday.
Wednesday.
Hollow days, meaningless days, miserable days.
I had the phone number of Pittsburgh Peggy, but I didn't feel like dialing it. She was too young for me, too sweet, too innocent. I had had my night of fun, and so had she, but we weren't meant for each other. Hell, I didn't even have a college education. There was no future for her with me, and I didn't want to waste her time. If I needed sex, I could get all I wanted elsewhere.
Say, with Kelly Green.
I thought of calling Kelly. But there was always the fear that Lisa would answer the phone, and that the not yet healed wound would reopen. I didn't dare talk to Lisa, because it would set me back in my attempt to forget her. Not that I was getting anywhere, anyhow: I don't think ten minutes in a row went by without my thinking of Lisa.
On Thursday I decided to phone Kelly. I was feeling pretty randy, and I figured she probably was too, what with Sam Andrews an invalid. As for the problem of Lisa's answering the phone, I figured out an easy solution. If Lisa answered, I would simply hang up. I could try again a little while later and hope for Kelly.
I dialed the Oakland number.
The phone rang three times. Then someone picked up the receiver.
"Hello?"
Lisa's voice, it was, soft and husky. Not the brassy strident tone that meant Kelly had answered.
I thought about my nice easy solution. Just put the phone down and call again late.
Nice and easy.
Sweat broke out all over me.
"Hello, Lisa," I said. "I didn't mean to disturb you or anything-"
"Jim?" she asked.
"That's right."
A moment of silence.
Then I said, "How have you been, Lisa?"
"All right."
"And your father?"
"He's getting better. Slowly. They think he'll be able to use his left side again in a couple of months if he keeps on gaining this fast."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"Jim, you mustn't talk of him as my father," she said. "He's your father too."
"I'm still not used to that idea."
"You've got to get used to it."
"Yeah," I said. Another sticky silence.
Then I said, "Everybody misses you at work."
"I miss the place, too."
"Donatelli asked after you. He couldn't understand you quit without notice."
"What did you tell him?"
"That your father had a stroke."
"That's all?"
"That's all," I said. "He thought maybe I got you pregnant and that's why you left."
"He was always a busybody," Lisa said. "But I do miss working there."
"You could come back. They'd be glad to take you back, Lisa."
"No. No, I couldn't, Jim."
"Sure you could."
"It wouldn't be wise."
Still another long, long pause, neither of us wanting to say goodbye.
Again I broke it. "Lisa, I miss you terribly."
"I'm sure you do, Jim."
"Don't you miss me?"
"Of course."
"Then why are we torturing ourselves this way?"
"Jim, please-"
"It doesn't have to be a hell on earth tor us. We could make each other so happy-"
"It's impossible, Jim."
"Don't say that!"
"It's the truth."
I took a deep breath. "Lisa, meet me in town tonight. Let's have dinner together. For old time's sake if nothing else."
"You've got to forget me, Jim."
"Damnit, I can't!" I blurted. "I love you, Lisa! I'll always love you! Please meet me."
"No."
"Just for an hour. That can't hurt, can it? We'll just sit across a dinner table from each other. We're brother and sister, you keep telling me. Can't I have dinner with my own sister and find out how my father is? What's wrong with that?"
"You know," she said.
"It's been hell, Lisa. I've been a wreck. Nothing makes me feel happy any more. Booze, sex-it's all meaningless without you. Listen, you can't turn me down. If you ever loved me, you'll meet me tonight for dinner."
Once again, a long loud silence.
Then for the first time in our conversation it was Lisa who broke the silence.
"Where would you want to eat, Jim?"
My heart leaped, and I said, "Omar Khayyam's, I guess, okay? For old times' sake."
"What time?"
"Eight?"
"All right," she said softly. "The night nurse will be here at seven. I'll leave when she comes. But just for dinner, Jim. Nothing afterward."
"It'll be good enough just to see you again," I said.
"We're making a big mistake tonight."
"We aren't," I insisted.
She sighed. "I'll see you at eight," she said. "In front of the restaurant."
I put down the phone. I realized I was trembling all over, and in a cold sweat.
But I was going to see Lisa again.
I was going to see Lisa again!
I grabbed up the phone, dialed the restaurant, reserved a table for two, the best one they had. Then I got out of my clothes in a hurry and headed down the hall to the shower. I scrubbed myself as hard as I knew how, trying to scrub away last week's orgy, trying to scrub away Kelly and Peggy, trying to scrub away everything that had come after Lisa. I shaved again, even though I had shaved that morning as usual. I wanted to look my best.
Excitement pounded through me. After almost two weeks I was going to see Lisa again. The darkness was starting to lift. This was just the beginning. If she had agreed to see me, that meant she was wavering. Maybe I could break down the icy wall of her resolve, and win her back.
Maybe.
It was crazy to think about winning your own sister's love. But it was a crazy situation.
I didn't stop to think about where it might end.
I could only think that in another hour I would be seeing Lisa.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She looked great. Even if it hadn't been ten or twelve days since I last saw her, I would have thought that. She was wearing one of her best dresses, and her hair had a sparkling, lustrous gleam to it. Her eyes were bright, and she was smiling a little nervously.
I had reached the restaurant early, about twenty minutes of eight.
But Lisa was early too. She got there about three minutes after me. That was a good sign, an important omen. She was just as impatient to see me again as I was to see her.
But our hellos were restrained, even chaste. She came up to me as I stood outside the restaurant, and as I went toward her she held out her hand.
I took it, squeezed it. The nails were still short, and filed smooth.
I held her small, cool hand in mine.
"Lisa," I said. "Lisa, it's been so goddamn long."
"I know, Jim. How have you been?"
"Not so well. You?"
"I missed you."
We didn't kiss. We didn't even hug, though it would certainly have been all right for a brother and a sister to hug and kiss. An ordinary brother and sister, that is to say. Not a pair like us.
We went in. The maitre de showed us to our table-in the corner, a good table. The waiter came over, smiled at us as though we were visiting royalty, asked us if we would care for cocktails.
We did. Lisa had a manhattan, I had a vodka martini. We sat there sipping our drinks and looking across the table at each other.
Just looking.
She looked so beautiful I wanted to cry. She had lost some weight, and her eyes were bloodshot; but she had the same slim delicate loveliness, the same fresh youthful look, every feature perfectly shaped.
It was hard to get a conversation going, after the days of being apart. We were both awkward and hesitant.
"How is-Father?" I asked. "Really."
"I told you. They think he'll get the use of his limbs back."
"How is he taking it all?"
"Pretty miserably. He can't get used to the idea of being a cripple, even for a while."
"And Kelly?" I asked.
"What about her?"
"How is she managing?"
"She goes into his bedroom now," Lisa said with an expression of disgust on her face. "He asked the doctor and the doctor said it was all right, provided he didn't overdo it. A couple of animals, that's all they are, even if he is my own father."
"You sound like such a puritan," I said. "It was okay for you to do it, but not them?"
She shrugged. "They make the whole thing seem so beast-like. They don't love each other. It's pure animal sex and nothing more."
I didn't press the point, since I had had more than my share of pure animal sex myself-including some with Kelly Green. I said, "The fact that he's paralyzed doesn't interfere?"
"How should I know?" Lisa snapped. "I don't watch them doing it."
Then the tension left her face, and she smiled. "I'm sorry, Jim," she said in a softer voice. "I didn't mean to bark at you. It's just that-well, I've been pretty overwrought since that night."
"So have I."
"It's been hell, hasn't it?"
"It's been worse than hell," I said. "At least you earn it when you go to hell. But we didn't do anything to deserve what happened to us."
The conversation trickled off. We were having real trouble finding things to say to each other. I knew why I was having trouble, at least. It was because I couldn't say the thing I really wanted to say.
What I really wanted to say was, Come home with me tonight, Lisa. To hell with the taboos of society-we've been apart long enough.
But I couldn't say that. And anything else I might have said was meaningless.
Lisa wasn't talking much either. I wondered if the same thoughts were going through her head as through mine. Maybe she was fighting back temptation, too. Maybe she wanted me as much as I wanted her, but didn't dare say it, for fear of restarting what was better off left dead.
We didn't talk much and we didn't eat much. But we did a lot of looking at each other.
We were through with dessert about quarter past nine, and we stepped outside. It was a good sort of San Francisco summer night, cool but not particularly breezy, and there was hardly any fog.
"Well," she said, "I guess I'll be heading home now, I guess."
"No."
"We were just meeting for dinner."
"It's early," I insisted. "Don't run away just yet. I won't bite you."
"Where do you want to go, then?"
I hesitated. I couldn't come out with the truth: that I wanted her to come home with me. Instead I said, "Let's go to the Top of the Mark."
She giggled. "Only tourists do that!"
"But I'm a tourist," I said. "I'm new here. I've never been there. Have you?"
"Oh, sure. Lots of times."
"I thought only tourists went."
She shrugged. "I went with tourists, sometimes.
They don't matter. If you'd like to go, I'll go with you."
"Your car or mine?" I asked.
"Mine," she said. "It looks better for the neighborhood, I think."
We went over to the big Cadillac. I felt a little annoyed about going in her car. I hate to have women drive me. It's kind of a blow at my manhood, I guess.
But Lisa had an instinctive understanding of the situation. Without a word she handed me the keys as we approached the car. I opened it and we got in.
I had never driven a Caddy before. Of course, it was just like the Chevrolet, so far as the operations of driving went, except that my car had a stick shift and this was automatic. But I had never experienced that feeling of power before, the idea that if I turned the car and rammed it into the side of the nearest building, the building would fall down in a heap.
I drove up the hill to the Mark Hopkins Hotel, and found a parking space across the street.
We went in.
The lobby was crowded. We got into the elevator and went up, up, up.
The Top of the Mark is the place where not only tourists but lovers go, in San Francisco. Especially on a cloudless night, when the view is good. The place was so crowded we had to wait fifteen minutes to get in. But then we were lucky and got ourselves a window seat. We could see out all over San Francisco, sparkling lights strewn as far as the eye could reach.
Lisa ordered cognac. I had the same. The cognac came in beautiful, tapering, little glasses. We held them up, looked at the lovely brandy, started to touch glasses.
Then we drew back. We both realized at the same moment that we had nothing to drink to, no happiness that we could toast.
We drank quietly and looked out at the city.
We had refills. The place was getting more crowded by the minute and I had qualms about taking up a precious window seat much longer. There were real lovers waiting, people who could dream about the future instead of just about the past, and I felt guilty making them wait.
"Let's go," I said softly.
"All right."
We went out, down the endless elevator, and into the street. Across to her car. I drove the Cadillac back down the hill, back to Omar Khayyam's, where my car was parked.
We both got out.
I handed her the keys. "Well," I said lamely, "I guess that's it for tonight."
She smiled. I saw tears in her eyes.
"TT "
Jim-
"It was a swell evening, wasn't it, Lisa?"
"It was so good to see you again."
"Same here. We won't wait so long till the next time, will we?".
"No. We won't."
"Well-"
"Goodnight, Jim."
"Goodnight, Lisa."
I held her hand for a moment, then let go and turned away so she wouldn't see the moistness in my own eyes. It had been a good evening. But I hadn't kissed her at all. I hadn't told her how much I loved her. It had been a completely chaste evening. We had hardly said anything at all to each other. Our real feelings had been left unvoiced.
I walked away, got in my car, turned it on. I let the motor idle for a while, then started off toward home. I was in a relaxed, somewhat depressed mood. Seeing Lisa again reminded me of what I had lost, and now I was going home, alone, to my lonely bed. Not even Ronnie in town. I would sleep alone tonight.
I drove along ten blocks or so. Then, as I stopped for a traffic light, I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw a cream-colored Cadillac about four cars back of me.
Lisa?
But this wasn't the way back to Oakland! Was she following me?
I shook my head. There were plenty of cream-colored Cadillacs in San Francisco. It wasn't Lisa behind me, couldn't possibly be. Just a coincidence.
I drove on. The neighborhood got shabbier as I approached home, and the traffic got lighter, and the cream-colored Caddy continued to tail me.
Could it be? Lisa!
My heart raced. Cold sweat made my hands slippery on the wheel. I got to my block, and the Cadillac was still behind me. I parked.
The Cadillac parked up the block.
I got out.
Lisa got out.
I walked to the entrance of the house and waited for her. She came up to me, looking very pale, very tense, very frightened.
"You came after me," I said.
"I couldn't stay away from you."
"Lisa-"
"Let's go upstairs."
"Lisa, I love you."
"It's a mistake. We shouldn't be doing this, Jim. I know it's wrong even while I'm doing it. But I couldn't stay away."
"I love you, Lisa."
I wrapped her cold hand in mind and we went in, and upstairs. We entered my little room. I closed the door, locked it.
We turned to each other. My arms went around her shoulders-I drew her against me and my lips met hers and we kissed. Not a brother-and-sister kiss at all-oh, no. Our bodies pressed tight, her mouth opened wide to me, and my tongue dove deep within.
We stood that way for a long while. I snaked my hand down between our bodies to cup her breast, and I felt the thump-thump of her heart.
She was trembling.
"I'm scared, Jim."
"There's nothing to worry about. We love each other, and that's all that counts, Lisa."
She shook her head. "No. We're defying the whole world. We're defying God."
"God is love. And I love you and you love me. That's what matters. The only thing that matters."
She looked up at me, her eyes wide, fearful. I kissed the tears away. She smiled.
There was some gin left, from the night of Pittsburgh Peggy. "How about a drink?" I suggested.
"I think I could use one."
We had one. And then another.
And then I began to take her clothes off, slowly, lingeringly, lovingly, as though this were the first time for either of us.
I unbuttoned her dress, she stepped out of it, and I hung it carefully in the closet. It was her good dress-I didn't want it to get creased.
Then we drew her slip over her head and folded it across the back of a chair. Bra and panties and stockings still remained. I put my arms around her waist and flattened my hands on her back, just where her buttocks began. She responded, letting her body go limp against me, letting me support her with my arms.
I kissed her closed eyes. She sighed, smiled a little as the fear receded. I kissed her jaw, her throat. I nibbled the lobes of her ears. She let her head droop back.
I kissed her shoulder and worked slowly downward toward the first rise of her breasts. With my right hand I nimbly unhooked her bra, slipped the straps off her arms, and it fell to the floor. It was so simple. She was naked to the waist, now. For the first time since that terrible morning in Union Square, I held Lisa in my arms and could caress her body.
I put my lips between her breasts, slipping my hands up her sides until they cupped the fullnesses on either side, pressing the solid flesh against my cheeks. Her fingers curled around the back of my head, moving through my hair. I could still feel the thumping of her heart, but now it seemed to me that it was thumping out of rising excitement, rather than out of fear.
I drew the panties down and off.
Now she wore nothing but the garter-belt and stockings. I knelt before her, kissing the sweet round of her belly, kissing the soft flesh along the inside of each thigh, then suddenly burying my head in the womanhood of her. She gasped and sighed as I caressed her, my hands gripping her bare buttocks, the fingertips digging into the firm satiny flesh.
Then I stood back. She looked so sexy in those stockings and garterbelt that I thought I would explode from sheer want. I began to undress.
Lisa came to help me.
With the two of us at work on the project, we had all my clothes off in a jiffy. She pressed up against me, and then drew her hands over me, touching each part of my body as though it was brand new to her. She lingered in one particular place for a long while.
Then it was time to finish undressing her.
I unclipped the garters and drew the nylons gently down her perfect legs. Only the garter-belt stood in the way of total nudity, now; and in another instant it no longer was in the picture.
We stood by the side of the bed, body to body, her breasts touching me, the nipples hard as rock. I lifted her chin, smiled down at her.
"I love you," I said.
"Jim, I'm afraid-"
"You wouldn't have come here if you were afraid. Tell me you love me."
"Jim-"
"Tell me."
"I love you, Jim."
"Again?"
"I love you. I love you. I love you."
She was smiling, now. The clouds were breaking up. I slipped one arm around her shoulders, put the other under her soft buttocks, and swung her easily up on the bed. She lay there, resting on her elbows, looking at me with an invitation in her eyes.
I went to her.
She whispered, "This is a sin, Jim."
"People in love make up their own rules, Lisa. It's only a sin to other, people. The real sin would be to deny ourselves love."
I cupped her breasts. I squeezed gently, feeling the nipples grow even harder. Then I moved up and down her body, covering it with kisses, not missing a single luscious inch. When I had finished with the front of her, I flipped her over, and put my lips first to one dimpled buttock, then the other. Lisa laughed.
It was her old laugh, her pleasure-laugh. The laugh I hadn't heard in a long time. Too long.
I hovered above her. She came to a sitting position, and stroked my chest, and then moved lower. Her small fingers seemed even smaller by contrast with my body.
I was on fire. I couldn't hold back much longer.
But I wanted this to be really good, for Lisa. I didn't want her to regret at all her sudden, impulsive decision to follow me home.
I told myself that this was my sister, that I was committing one of mankind's oldest crimes, that common sense argued that I shouldn't touch her.
To hell with common sense.
"I love you, Jim," she whispered.
"Do you want me?"
"Yes! Yes, I want you!"
"When? Tell me when?"
"Now! I can't wait another second, Jim! I'm burning up! Jim! Jim!"
I nodded. My own breath was coming in gusty bursts. I brought myself close to her body.
Lisa gave a long, low moan as our bodies came together to make the unnatural coupling complete. Whatever we had done before, we could be absolved of, for we had acted in ignorance. But not now. Now, for the first time, we were openly and shamelessly committing incest in full knowledge of the fact of our relationship.
It was a point of no return.
Lisa was gripping me tightly. I plunged forward again and again, faster and faster.
"I love you," she whispered. "Oh, my darling, I love you so much,"
"I love you, Lisa."
She drove against me, faster and faster, keeping my rhythm. We panted and sweated. I had never known excitement like this-the excitement of the forbidden, the excitement of gratification after long abstinence. It was overpowering.
Her breasts filled my hands. Her body plunged and bucked beneath mine.
For a moment sanity returned to me and I felt fear for what we were doing. Then I brushed the fear aside. I cupped Lisa's buttocks and she arched her back, and I drove to the depths of her. In the same moment her entire body quivered violently, and she sobbed and clawed my back with her stubby filed nails, and in one long surge of passion I gave vent to my fulfillment as she was engulfed by hers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She stayed the night. Almost. We made love again and again, until it was nearly morning. Our bodies clashed and grappled as we strained to the utmost to make up for all the wasted days. It was quite a session.
Nothing we had done before matched it in any way. We tried every position under the sun, and maybe a couple that had never been tried before. We went at it with a kind of deadly seriousness and at the same time in a real spirit of pure fun. It was a ball from beginning to end.
Then, around half past four in the morning, we both began to run out of steam. I was flat on my face on the floor, half asleep and half awake; and Lisa was lying like a corpse on the bed, on her back with her legs apart and dangling over the edge.
I got up and walked over to her. I leaned down and put one hand on each firm thigh, pushing them apart a little. She opened her eyes.
"Hi," she said. "Coming back for more?"
I shrugged. "I wish I could."
"Poor old man. Nine or ten times is the limit for you, is it?" She laughed. "Weir have to get you a monkey gland operation. At your age you should be good for at least a dozen a night"
"You wish."
I ran my hands up and down her thighs, then to her belly, then to the sleek globes of her breasts. But it was no use. I had had it for the night. And so had she, I was willing to bet. A woman's tissues are pretty delicate, and she had given them a workout. She wasn't saying anything, but I was sure she was swollen and raw after our acrobatics, and wouldn't mind a rest.
She sat up, then stood. "I'd better be going now," she said.
"Let's curl up and go to asleep."
"No. I want to be back before morning."
"You aren't living with that landlady now," I pointed out.
"All the same. I want to be there to give my father his breakfast." She stroked my body affectionately. "Don't worry. I'll be back. Everythings going to be all right"
I watched her dress. Every motion was so graceful, so beautiful. I would have rather watched her undressing than dressing, but either way the effect was a delight.
She came over to me and kissed me, lightly. "Love me?" she asked. "Of course. You love me?"
"Always."
We grinned at each other. Then she left.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling a warm glow of satisfaction. The night had turned out better than I had dared to dream. Not only had I seen Lisa again, but I had brought her home with me and we had made love and it had been terrific.
Only now I began to feel depressed. Part of it was the natural backwash from my earlier elation. First you go up, then you come down-it's inevitable. But I was also troubled about the shape of the future.
Where were Lisa and I heading?
It was all right to have a rollicking night in bed, as we had just done, maybe. But I had to take the long view, to look at the big picture. People who are as much in love as Lisa and I normally get married. It's the standard thing to do. And most people who get married eventually have children. That's the standard thing to do, too.
But where did that leave us?
We couldn't have children. At least it seemed like a risky thing to do, in view of the blood tie between us. I had to be realistic about the situation. To have children would make the whole crazy relationship even uglier than it already was.
Could we marry and not have children?
Well, sure. There were ways. I knew a fellow who had himself sterilized surgically so he wouldn't have to worry about making his wife pregnant any more, after their fifth kid The operation cost him less than a hundred bucks, didn't hurt at all, and was no more complicated than getting tonsils taken out. Quick, safe, efficient. Presto-jingo, no more babies.
I could have myself sterilized too, and then there'd be no fear of making Lisa pregnant. But that would deprive her of the pleasures of being a mother. And I knew that would hurt her. She was such a warm, outgoing person that she would want to have children.
Well, I thought, even that could be worked out. We could have artificial insemination-she would be made pregnant, but not by me, and nobody would be the wiser for it. It was one way out. But somehow that seemed distasteful to me. The whole business seemed distasteful. I didn't want to get sterilized. I didn't want Lisa to undergo artificial insemination.
I wanted her to bear my children.
But that was impossible.
Round and round and round. My head began to ache. I saw that Lisa's original idea had been the best--or us to part and never see each other again.
But that was impossible too.
What do you do when you find yourself caught between two conflicting and opposite impossibilities?
You go to sleep. At least, that's what I chose to do. It was the coward's way out, but I didn't have any other ideas at the moment.
I wasn't good for very much at work the next day. My alarm went off as usual at quarter to eight, and I had had exactly three hours of sleep. Coming on top of that wild night with Lisa, I felt drained and exhausted. When I looked at myself in the mirror I could see exactly how peaked I really was.
I debated calling in sick, and decided not to. It was Friday, and the lab frowned on technicians calling in sick just before the weekend. They were known to send doctors around to investigate, sometimes. I didn't want that. The best I could say was that I had had a big night the night before, and the medic wouldn't go for that.
I didn't want to lose my job. I liked it too much.
So, groggy or not, I went to work.
I wasn't good for much that day, but at least I was there. I picked up my paycheck, anyway; so it was worthwhile to have gone in.
I got home around quarter of six, still feeling sleepy. I opened the door and thought for a moment that I was having an hallucination.
There was a naked girl m my room.
I blinked and looked again.
She was still there.
Lisa.
"Surprise!" she laughed.
She was standing by the window. Her clothes had been neatly folded on the chair. I stood there gaping at her, feasting my eyes on those high, firm breasts, on the gentle sweep of belly, the outcurve of hip, the twin white columns of her thighs.
Then I went to her and folded her in my arms. Her supple body was soft and pliable against me. I crushed her against my body, hugging her hungrily until it occurred to me that I might be pressing the tender swells of her breasts against the buttons of my jacket, and I released her and stepped back to take her all in with one glance.
"How did you get in?" I asked.
"Wasn't hard. I used a pass key. Old building like this, all the locks are pretty much alike."
"You devil," I said. My pulse rate was climbing at the sight of her impish nakedness. "But suppose I had brought some of my pals home with me?"
"Then they would have had a free show," she said simply. "They wouldn't have minded."
"No, I guess not. How long have you been here?"
"Since five-fifteen."
"Waiting for me. All ready for action."
"Uh-huh. Action first, then dinner, then more action," she said. "I love you."
"I love you," I echoed. She came to me.
Her body clung to mine for a moment. Then she got my jacket off and my tie and my shirt and everything else-I was nude inside of a minute flat. Lisa grabbed me by the wrist, tugged me toward the bed.
"Impatient one, aren't you?" I said.
"I haven't had you for twelve whole hours, darling. Do you realize that?"
"Closer to fourteen hours by now."
"That makes it all the worse. Come here."
She drew me down. I kissed her cheek lightly, then put my face against her hair and inhaled. She didn't need to wear any perfume. Her own was the best there was.
She grasped me to her, burying my head in the valley of her breasts, moaning for me to do more. My lips sought each nipple, kissed their sweet firmness, nipping at them until throaty animal sounds were coming from her mouth.
"Jim, oh, Jim, that's the best feeling in the world-oh, yes, don't stop!"
My hand sought the firm roundness of her calf, found it, continued up over creamy thighs to the junction of her legs. A finger wandered toward the well of her body. Her thighs were warm against me.
She spread-eagled and opened the gates to me, opened them wide.
I took her and I heard music in my brain, drums and trumpets beating out a tattoo of joy.
Her body writhed against mine. She leaped as though an electric current were passing through her. Again and again I plunged and thrust, she answered with plunges and thrusts of her own; and then came the up-welling moment of completion, the warm radiant burst of pleasure, and she sobbed and I gasped and we gave ourselves up to it blindly, wildly.
For a long time afterward, we rested side by side on the narrow bed. Then Lisa turned to me and said, "We ought to go out for dinner now."
"Mmmm," I said sleepily.
"I'm hungry, Jim."
"Mmmm."
She got up. I watched her tiptoe across the room to the sink and wash up. Then she looked around for her clothes. She went over to the chair and reached into the pile of clothes for her garter-belt. As she pulled it out, she accidentally knocked her blouse off.
She bent over to pick it up.
Saucily, she held the pose for my benefit. It was a mistake, so far as our going out to eat right away was concerned. I stared at her buttocks-trim, tightly packed, undeniably feminine buttocks. Two swelling balls of flesh sprouting from her back. I stared. Right cheek, left cheek. There was a metallic taste in my mouth as I ogled the two taut globes.
"You know something?" I said. "I'm hungry too. But for something else."
I left the bed and came toward her with lance upraised.
She started to straighten up. I pressed up against her, and she giggled. I cupped my hands over her breasts and slid in against her buttocks, the curvy white flesh cool against my thighs and belly. I felt the yielding firmness give slightly, and then she backed up, spearing herself on me as I wanted her to do.
Leaning forward, she braced herself on the chair. I squeezed her breasts and took her standing up. The novelty of the position made it an exciting one for both of us. It was a while before we got to dinner.
We had lasagne at the Italian place on the corner. We washed it down with a bottle of good Chianti, none of your California stuff but honest Tuscan wine in a straw wrapper.
Then it was back to my room.
And back to our favorite from of exercise.
We were hungry for each other, and it was a continuation of Thursday night. Our bodies sought one another as though sex were being prohibited by law the middle of next week. Our energies were inexhaustible. I didn't know I could manage it that many times. It was a voyage of self-discovery for both of ns.
Of course, there was something panicky about the way we were making love, though neither of us would openly acknowledge the fact. We were throwing ourselves at each other because we knew a shadow hung over us, because we knew that neither God nor man sanctioned our love, because we wanted to get in as much loving as we could before reality intervened and drove us apart.
Around ten that night, Lisa said goodbye and drove off to Oakland to tend her father, our father. I hit the pillow gratefully. Twelve hours of sleep and I felt like a new man.
But a worried one. Naturally I was delighted that Lisa had come back to me. The long-term outlook, though, wasn't a bright one. We were both deliberately pretending there was no tomorrow, only today.
But tomorrow always comes. That's the hell of the situation.
For the time being, we didn't let such things get m the way of our pleasure. We spent Saturday in a quiet, friendly way. It was bright and sunny, and we drove out to Golden Gate Park and wandered around, hand in hand, looking at the dahlias and laughing at the giraffes. We went to the acquarium and peered at the fish, and they peered back at us. We looked at stuffed elephants in the natural history museum. We hiked across to the art museum and saw the Gainsboroughs.
Then when our feet ached from all the hiking around, we stretched out in the grass and kicked our shoes off and relaxed, like a couple of school kids with a bad case of poppy love. After a while we felt like getting on the move again, so we went over to the Japanese gardens, strolled around admiring its formal beauty, and had tea in the teahouse. Our waitress was a delicate little Japanese girl who looked like she was made of porcelain. But then I was reminded of that equally graceful, fragile, doll-like girl at the night club Kelly Green had taken me to, the Chinese girl who had thrown herself in a running leap at that Negro, and I felt a little uncomfortable.
We drove back toward the city late in the day, relaxed and happy. We went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.
"I'm tired of always eating in restaurants," Lisa said. "I wish I could cook dinner for you."
"I wish so too."
"If only you could come out to our place-"
"Why not?"
"Father would see you. He'd hit the roof if he knew I was still going out with you."
"He's bedridden. You could keep me out of sight and he'd never know."
She shook her head. "He has to know about everyone who comes into the house. I couldn't hide the truth from him. No, you can't come out there. And there's no place where I can cook in your room."
"I guess we'll have to go on eating at restaurants," I said.
"I guess we will."
But I knew what was in the back of her mind. She was unhappy that we weren't able to set up housekeeping together. I knew she wanted something permanent, not this floating business of going back and forth in a car, and making love in a furnished room.
I wanted something better for us, too.
But I knew it was impossible to have it.
She knew it too.
Saturday night, after dinner, we made love in my room. It was a more sober, restrained session than on Thursday or Friday, because the impetus of having each other again was starting to wear off a little. Not that we were losing interest; just that we were tapering off a little, like honeymooners on the third or fourth day. Even so, it was a pretty torrid night.
Sunday we went for a picnic at Lincoln Park. We walked along the beach, and then drove over to Seal Rocks to peer through the telescope at the seals, and went to the fun house. And then back to my place for the business, as usual.
She had a little surprise for me Sunday night.
After dinner she announced, "I'm going to stay overnight. If you want me to."
"Of course I want you to! But how-"
She grinned. "The nurse doesn't need me around. Dad's improving by leaps and bounds. I simply said I wouldn't be back tonight. Nobody can stop me."
So she stayed.
It was the first time we had slept together in the real meaning of the word, lying all night in each other's arms. The bed was narrow, and so our bodies were never far apart. I cupped her soft warm breasts and slipped my knee between her thighs, and we hugged and kissed. Now and then our bodies came together and we raced uphill toward the summit of pleasure.
It was a wonderful night. Calm and relaxed and easy, the two of us turning to each other every few hours for love, and sleeping in between.
Then the alarm went off. Monday morning.
I opened my eyes. Lisa smiled at me.
"Good morning," she said.
"Hi," I said. "You know, that's a great sight to see first thing in the morning."
"What is?"
"You is."
"I love you."
"I love you."
Then she pulled surprise number two. "Hurry up and get shaved and dressed," she said. "We're going to work together this morning."
"Huh?"
"I'm going to ask for my job back," she said. "Dad's getting better, and there's no reason to stay away from you any more, so why not go back?"
"Why not?"
"Sure. Why not?"
There wasn't any problem of taking her back. They were glad to have her, and Miss What'sis, who had replaced her, was transferred into someone else's office.
Now began the happiest period of my life. Lisa moved into my room. We bought a little hotplate and a refrigerator, just like Ronnie had, and she cooked for me. I introduced Ronnie to Lisa, and the two girls got along just fine. Of course, I didn't tell Lisa that I had been occasionaly sleeping with Ronnie. Not that I really thought Lisa would be upset by the news.
Every day we drove to work together, and every night we came home. Three or four times a week, Lisa would take the bus out to Oakland to visit our father. Naturally I couldn't come along. Naturally, too, Lisa didn't tell him where she was living.
Everything was smooth and wonderful. Lisa and I never missed a night of making love. I would turn out the light and there would be her soft, beautiful body waiting for me. Never a night when she wasn't in the mood, never a night when she turned her back on me and told me to go to sleep. It was a great life.
But we were living in a fool's paradise, a dream world of pure fantasy. We were riding high, but riding for a fall. We tried to pretend otherwise, but now and again I would soberly wonder when trouble would come.
We were performing a tightrope act, really. But we weren't thinking about the other end of the tightrope, which was shrouded in mist. We were just blindly going forward and hoping for the best.
Trouble was due.
Soon enough, trouble came.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everything was going smoothly. Lisa had been living with me for maybe a month and a half, and we hadn't had a moment's disharmony. We made love every night.
Think about that statement a little. If you know anything at all about feminine biology, you'll suspect something odd. Making love every night for six weeks? That meant the girl was extremely irregular, or else-
Yeah.
Or else.
As I said, we were living in a fool's paradise, and I didn't even bother to think about little details like biology. I noticed Lisa getting moody and preoccupied, obviously worrying about something; but I didn't know what in particular it might me.
I went along serenely with my eyes tight closed to the possibility of any sort of trouble.
And one day Lisa dropped her bombshell.
It was a windy day in August, and there was the threat of rain overhead as we drove home from the office. Lisa had not said a word all the way. She was sitting at the far end of the seat, against the door. I wondered if I had halitosis or something.
I said, finally, "What's the matter, Lisa?"
"Nothing."
"Something's eating yon. Tell me all about it. Get it off your chest."
"I'm just feeling blue, Jim."
"You've been feeling blue all week. Come on, now. Out with it."
"All right," she said. "Since you want to know-I'm going to have a baby, Jim."
I was so rocked I almost lost control of the car. It swerved about three feet to the left, and a Volkswagen that was in that lane honked angrily at me. I got myself together, changed lanes, and pulled off on the shoulder before I did some damage.
"A baby?" I repeated stupidly.
"That's right." Her voice was bitter. "A little bundle of joy. A gift from heaven."
"How long have you known?"
"I've suspected for almost a month. I had the test on Friday and got the answer Monday."
"When's it due?"
"Early March, most likely. I'm in my third month right now."
I was trembling all over. "This is going to be my baby?" I blurted.
She glared at me. "Who else do you think the father would be?"
"I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I didn't mean-"
"Okay. Okay."
"A baby," I said, feeling numb. "What are we going to do?"
"I wish I knew."
"There are doctors wholl take care of it," I said. TH find one somewhere. A good doctor. Plenty of good doctors do things like that. It'll cost five or six hundred bucks, maybe, but-"
"No."
"It's the only way, Lisa."
"I'm not going to murder my baby. I wouldn't be able to live with myself afterward."
"But it's our baby. And we're brother and sister. You know we can't bring a child like that into the world, Lisa. It-"
"You should have thought of that when you talked me into seeing you again," she said. "I knew this would happen. That's why I wanted you to get out of my life. But then you called me that night-"
"You voluntarily followed me home," I pointed out.
"All right. So it's my fault too!"
"Sweetheart-look, there's no sense snapping at each other like this. We both have been damned foolish, and now we're going to pay the price for it. Unless we get rid of that baby."
"No! I won't do it!"
"You've got to."
"I'm afraid," she whimpered. "Oh, Jim, hold me. I know we can't have the baby, but I want to have it. The operation-suppose I couldn't ever have a child after the operation?"
"Whose child do you want to have?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'm all mixed up, Jim. I want a baby so badly-I want your baby-but I know I can't have your baby-"
She started to cry. I had never seen her cry before. I held her tight, stroking her, soothing her.
After a while she said, in a stranger voice, "Start the car. Let's get home."
We didn't say much the rest of the trip. But I kept thinking over and over again that she had to get rid of that baby. A damned shame, but we had no choice in the matter: we couldn't bring a child into being.
It highlighted the craziness of our whole love affair. Lisa needed to bear children, and wanted to bear my children, but she couldn't. Better that we had never met, I thought, then to get into a fix like this.
And we had to get rid of the baby fast. She wasn't far along in her pregnancy. I didn't know a hell of a lot about abortion; but one thing I did know was the longer you waited, the more dangerous it got. In the third or fourth month it could be perfomred pretty easily and safely. By the seventh or eighth month it became a very, very risky proposition.
So we had to act fast. I had only a month or so to find a capable doctor who would handle the job at a price we could afford.
And I had to talk Lisa into ft, too.
That posed a bigger problem than finding the doctor. Because Lisa was dead set on having that baby.
"We can't," I would tell her. "Suppose someone found out about us."
"No one will find out."
"We'll have to fill out documents listing our parents," I said. "How. can we get around that?"
"My father's name was Sani Andrews," she said. "Yours was Len Collins. What's wrong with that?"
I shook my head. "It won't work."
"It will! We'll move somewhere far away. To Mexico, or to New York, or to Canada. My father can get along without me. We'll go where he can never find us, and we'll get married-legally-and we'll forget that we're brother and sister. It's only by a fluke that we found out, anyway." I
"This is idiotic, Lisa. You've got to be reasonable about this."
"Were you reasonable?" she blazed. "When I first told you how we were related, you were the one who wanted to make a go of it!"
"That was different-no child was involved."
"That's right," she said. "No child was involved. Exactly." She folded her arms defensively across her belly, as though protecting it. "Now a child is involved. My child. Our child. And I'm taking an entirely different attitude. I'm not going to let you have my baby killed, Jim. I won't!"
There was no talking her out of it. She was stubborn, adamant, unshaken.
I had to let the matter drop for the time being.
A couple of days went by. We hardly even spoke of her pregnancy. She didn't look pregnant yet. Her belly had its gentle curve; but there was no swelling yet, no sign of the inch-long creature sprouting within her, her child, our child, the offspring of our unnatural love.
We tried to get back to normal. Lisa held me tight in bed, pressed herself to me. I took her breasts in my mouth, and started to draw on them, and then stopped, thinking that in another six months someone else would be suckling there. I held her body and cupped her buttocks and opened her thighs and plunged to the depths of her. Ironically, I no longer had to worry about getting her pregnant. We could enjoy our lovemaking to the hilt, because she could only get pregnant once at a time.
But the savor was gone from our sex. There was too much fear in it for me, fear of what the future held for us now.
Time was wasting. Day by day, that baby was growing. The safe period for an abortion was ticking away, minute after minute after minute. I wondered when it would be too late. I didn't want to lose Lisa and the baby in the same operation.
I asked around discreetly at work. I talked to Mike Kearns and swore him to secrecy, and then said, "Lisa's in trouble. I've got to have a doctor."
"To get rid of it?"
"Yeah. You know anybody?"
"I'll see what I can find."
"It's got to be someone good," I said. "No back-of-the-barroom stuff."
"I'll see," he promised.
Mike found me a doctor, a good doctor with an otfice on Geary Street. He was in his thirties, and very capable-looking-obviously a first-rate man who for his own reasons had decided to bend the law a little. We had an interview and talked at arm's length, never really coming out and naming the nature of the operation, but it was perfectly clear to both of us what were discussing. He said he'd do it for $750, and we could work out terms if we didn't have the cash.
"All right," I said.
"What month is she in?"
"End of her third."
"Bring her around pretty soon. I'll want to examine her first. And we don't have much more time. I don't like to do these things after the fourth month."
I went home feeling cheerful again. But now I had the job of telling Lisa that on my own hook I had arranged for an abortion for her. She might get sore about that. I was going to have to be diplomatic about it.
All the way home I rehearsed things I could say to her, ways of coaxing her to go through with it. I would reason with her, staying calm and collected. I would-
I would nothing. She wasn't home when I got there.
The room was empty. I frowned. I had told her I was making a brief stop after work, and she had driven the Chevy home while I took the bus. She was supposed to be here. But she wasn't.
There was a note pinned to the pillow.
I grabbed it up.
It said, I can't go on any longer, Jim. I see just as clearly as you do that it's insane. I mustn't have that child, but I can't face murdering it. And if I can't ever have your child, I don't see any point in continuing the farce. Just remember I loved you, and be happy. Lisa.
No, I thought.
"No!" I yelled. "Lisa! Lisa!"
I rushed out of the place. I didn't know where to go, where to look. I was shaking like a leaf. What had she done to herself? Where was she?
Lisa!
I reached the street and looked around for the car. It wasn't in the usual place. It wasn't anywhere in sight, in fact.
Lisa!
The words of her note burned through my mind. She wouldn't, I thought, wouldn't kill herself. Wouldn't. Wouldn't. Wouldn't-
I staggered along the street like a drunk. I passed an open store and heard a scrap of news on the radio:
"-police found the body after dragging the bay for twenty minutes. She bore no identification."
I rushed in. The shopkeeper stared at me.
I said, "What was that on the news? What was that last item?"
He shrugged. He was an old man, had seen plenty of tragedy in his time. "Some girl jumped off the Golden Gate," he said. "Happens every day."
I rushed out.
"Lisa!" I yelled. "Lisa!"
A crowd was gathering. I ran against a lamppost and hugged it a moment, getting the shreds of my sanity together again. I knew what I had to do-I had to find out who that girl was, whether it was Lisa or not.
I went upstairs.
It was five after six. The next news broadcast was at quarter past. Those were the longest ten minutes I will ever live. Finally the news came on again.
Listening, I shivered with fear, and then the fear gave way to a kind of numb, chilled calm.
"Unidentified attractive girl leaps to her death ... black hair ... early twenties ... tragic suicide...."
I was cold all over. I picked up the phone, dialed the operator.
"Give me the police," I said.
I got the police. I told them I thought I could identify the girl who jumped from the bridge. "I think she was my sister," I said. "She's missing. And she was very upset lately. And she fits the description."
They sent a police car for me, and they took me downtown to the morgue. And let me into the place where the stiffs were kept.
And lifted the sheet.
It was Lisa. They had taken off all her clothes, and I resented the fact that all these cops had seen her naked body, had seen the nudity that belonged to me. Not that she was beautiful any more: she had broken bones in the impact of hitting the water; her slim, lovely limbs were crooked; her neck was twisted. Her skin was a grayish-blue color. Even her breasts, her beautiful breasts, looked droopy and old in death.
"Cover her," I said. "She's my sister."
They sat me down and took all the details.
"Her name was Lisa," I said. "Lisa Andrews."
"Your name's Collins. Half-sister?"
"No," I said. I explained how the family had split up, how my father had taken Lisa and changed his name to Andrews. I didn't say anything about our love affair. I didn't mention the suicide note that I had hidden in my room. When they asked me why I thought she had committed suicide, I said, "She was pregnant."
"You know the man?"
"No," I said. "She wouldn't tell me."
"Where did she live?"
"With her-with our father. In Oakland."
"What's the address?"
"I don't know. I can tell you the street, that's all."
"You don't know your own father's address?"
I shrugged. "We weren't friendly. I was only out there once. We're strangers to each other. You can find the address, though. His name's Sam Andrews. He's sick. Had a stroke a couple of months ago. Better not spring the news on him too fast."
"You want to tell him?"
I nodded.
"Yeah," I said. "I guess I better."
I went out. I got into my car and drove out to Oakland, feeling like a corpse inside. I didn't know the number, but I recognized the house. I parked and rang the bell.
Kelly Green answered. She wore only a transparent negligee. I could see the tips of her breasts and the indentation of her navel and all the rest of her.
"Hello, stranger."
I didn't look at her body. "Is Mr. Andrews home?"
"Where else would he be?"
"How is he?"
"Okay."
"Can he stand a shock?"
"What's the matter?"
"Lisa killed herself," I said tonelessly. "Let me talk to him."
He had improved five hundred per cent since our last meeting. There was only a trace of the paralysis in his face, and he was sitting up. He looked strong, tremendously strong. I hated him more than I've ever hated anyone.
He said, "So you came to see me?" I nodded. "With bad news."
"What?"
"Lisa jumped off the Golden Gate today," I said, half hoping he'd have another stroke.
He paled a little, but rode with the blow. Without blinking he said, "Is she dead?"
"Yes."
"Why'd she do it?"
"She was pregnant," I said. I moistened my lips. "By me. She was in her third month."
"So she's been living with you since she left here?"
"Yes," I said.
"A couple of damned fools," he muttered. He looked up at me. Suddenly there was fright and sorrow in the cruel face. "I'm sorry," he said in a soft voice. "Jimmy, I'm sorry. I had to tell her the truth. Don't you see-I was afraid something like this would happen. I'm sorry. I only hoped she'd have sense enough to keep away from you after I told her."
"She didn't. Neither did I."
"And now she's dead. Pregnant by her own brother." He spat. "Jesus! Jesus, what a lousy world this is!"
There was no point placing blame. And I didn't want to stick around him any more. I said, "I told the police she was living here all the time. And that she had a boy friend who got her pregnant. Better not contradict ft."
"No," he said. "I won't. I don't want any scandal."
"Neither do I," I said. "She's at the morgue. Arrange for her funeral. Invite me." I scribbled my address on a piece of paper. "So long," I said. "Dad."
"Jimmy-"
I walked out.
I passed Kelly on the way. She looked at me as though she wanted to rape me on the spot. I kept on going, out the door, into my car.
I drove home.
I knocked on Ronnie's door.
She was wearing a bathrobe. Her eyes were red. "Oh, Jim," she said. "I heard it on the news broadcast. It's terrible. But there's one thing I don't understand. They said she had been identified by her brother, I didn't know she had a brother. She never-"
"I'm her brother," I said. "She was pregnant by me. That's why she jumped."
"Oh, God," Ronnie said in a small voice.
I came inside. I sat down on a chair and told her the whole story. She began to cry first, and then I cried and she stopped.
"You poor kids," she kept saying. "You poor kids. What a lousy kick in the teeth from fate."
I went over to the bed and sat next to her. I felt terribly lonely, terribly empty inside. Ronnie put my head against her chest I felt the heavy globes of her breasts through her thin robe.
She held me, and then she sang to me, a sad song. After a while she opened her robe, and put my cheek against the warm roundness of her bare breast.
I took the robe off her. She understood. She undressed me, and drew me down. Her big, firm body comforted me. I went into her, and our bodies began to move in the age-old rhythms. She knew I had to have someone now, that I needed to cling.
There was no joy in it. It was like a drug.
I clasped her breasts in my hand and tunnelled into her. I plunged deep, and stayed there.
When it was over, she sang to me again, and I began to feel a little better.
"Rest," she said. "Sleep. There wasn't any other way out of it for you two. Rest, Jim. Rest."
She drew me against her breasts. I tried to rest. But there was the hollowness inside, and I couldn't rest. After a while we began to make love again. My need was a terrible one. She gave me her body. I might have killed myself that night but for Ronnie.
I didn't kill myself. Life goes on-In a way, anyhow. I don't feel very much alive. I walk, I talk, I eat, I have sex-
