Behind the sinister doors of the hotel Madison-Plaza, a dozen lust-starved lives played out their burning dramas. Ann Wentworth -- afraid she was a lesbian, afraid she was not; Tim Halloran -- any woman would do to ease his hunger, but a young blonde was what he had to find; Liz Lawrence -- virginal, yearning, eager for any and all men who could fill the inferno of her wanton flames. Jane Matthews -- the insatiable one whose twisted needs drove her into an evil embrace; Vic and Grace -- Bill and Regina -- couples whose marriages were stale and hopeless while their passions had not; Connie Franklin -- the frigid young blonde with many marriages but no real man; Joe York -- polite, boyish, soft-spoken, and a phantom rapist who prowled the streets looking for his next victim; Kenny and Emily -- the newlyweds who had to find out the hard way what life was all about. And others, meeting in the sin-trap of the hotel, exploding their passions, their obsessions, their terrible torments of lust!
CHAPTER ONE
This is a fairy tale, but don't get nervous: we're not talking about the kind who go around pretending they're not built like guys and wear makeup and talk in falsetto voices. We're no more interested in those than you are. Nor is it the kind of old-fashioned fairy tale which used to be peddled around by the Brothers Grimm. For one thing, those were intended strictly for the grade-school set, which is hardly the case here; and for another, the heroes and heroines of the Grimm legends are always noble and pure, whereas the characters in this one all are, or become, more than a little tarnished and earthy.
This one is a fairy tale because it starts with people with troubles and ends with their having vanquished their personal and private orges and living, most of 'em, happily ever after: But it's a modern, metropolitan, Nineteen-Sixties kind of fairy tale -- the kind that happens in New York City every week of the year.
It concerns a group of people who live on the third floor of an old, still-elegant hotel called the Madison-Plaza.
Experts on the big town will tell you there's no hotel in New York City called the Madison-Plaza, which shows you how much experts know. There is indeed a Madison-Plaza Hotel: the only thing is that that isn't quite its real name. We've fiddled around a little with the real name because the people on the third floor, as you'll see, have their own notions about how to cope with morals and with life and love, and some of these notions are more than a shade against the law. So. we've made a change here and there to keep the authorities away: in other words, unlike the late, lamented Dragnet, we've done it to protect the guilty.
The Madison-Plaza, despite its manufactured name, is not located on Madison Avenue; it is on Park Avenue, somewhere in the upper Fifties or the Sixties. It is now nearly forty years old, though it doesn't look it; and though it was once a residential hotel catering strictly to people to whom a million dollars was petty cash, it has now felt the competition of newer hotels so sharply that it mixes residentials and transients indiscriminately and houses mostly working people of middle income and below.
It is still a good-looking place, with lobby furniture replaced as recently as 1955 and lobby carpeting replaced in 1959, and it still has a haughty-looking bunch of doormen and elevator operators. It is still a desirable place in which to live because its Park Avenue address is impressive, because it is convenient to most midtown offices on foot or by subway or bus or cab, and because its yearly rental, now that it has long since let down its bars and waved goodbye to the Four Hundred, doesn't average out much higher than a good-neighborhood furnished apartment.
At the time our fairy tale begins, it is the summer of 1962. Or to put it another way, in case you don't like to mince words, right now.
CHAPTER TWO
Ann Wentworth lived in room 301 of the Madison-Plaza, and, like most of the residents of the third floor, she lived alone. She was a girl in her middle twenties, a slim blonde with dark-blue eyes, hair cut very short in pixie style, and a beautiful figure made especially eye-catching by the fact that her waist was unusually tiny and her full, high-pointed breasts were a little larger than most.
On the evening of June 20th, she sat in the darkness on her bed, too frozen with shock and bewilderment to cry.
The events which had brought her to her present state had not begun that same day. They had, in fact, she realized as she sat there in the darkness, begun nearly eight years ago, back in her little home-town in Wisconsin. Everything had begun when she'd graduated from high school and had attended the graduation prom with a tall, dark-haired boy whose name she couldn't even remember now.
Her parents had been very strict back in those days, and she'd never even gone out with a boy before, but they'd let Ann go out with the dark-haired boy that night because all the girls in the graduating class were being taken to the prom. And everything had gone extremely well through most of the evening: she'd danced gracefully and smoothly with the boy even though she'd never danced with a boy before in her life, she'd kept up her end of the conversation, and, after the dance, she'd even joined five other couples in sneaking into a cocktail lounge on the edge of town and gotten a little high with the rest of them.
But on the way home in the boy's old car, the boy had suddenly pulled his car off the road in a deserted area near the reservoir and had turned off the motor; and before Ann had realized exactly what was happening, he had put his arms around her. She'd let the boy kiss her, because her friends had said it was expected when a boy took a girl home. from a prom date -- but then, while they were kissing, the boy had suddenly slipped one hand into her dress and under her brassiere and onto her firm young breast, and the other under her dress. No, she couldn't remember the dark-haired boy's name any longer, but she could remember her reactions as clearly as if the incident had happened the previous week. She had felt an overwhelming, overpowering mixture of nausea and revulsion, and she had fought her way out of the boy's arms and out of his car, and then she had run nearly all of the two full miles it took her to reach her home.
She didn't tell her parents about the incident, and they simply assumed that the boy had taken her home and left her politely at the gate. She lay awake in bed until morning and faced herself for the first time. She asked herself the question she had forced away each time it had approached her mind in the past: Was she normal, or was she, as she'd suspected before this but refused to face until now, different from the other girls she knew?
Facing it now, she knew that her reaction back there in the car was not normal at all. She wasn't thinking about her flight from the boy's marauding hands: any young girl might react that way out of fear and embarrassment and shocked modesty and virginity. Some of her friends had, in fact, done exactly the same thing in similar situations; they'd confided that to her themselves. No, what she was thinking about was the reaction itself, the sensation deep inside her -- and that, she knew, was the abnormal part. Her friends had been frightened, just as she had, but they'd nevertheless felt some pleasant responses when the male hands had been placed upon them, the faint stirrings of feminine responses and stimulation -- whereas she'd felt nothing but violent distaste and sickness.
She thought about it a lot through that long night, facing many other things she had refused to face before this. Like, for example, the fact that she was the only girl in her group who had never been interested in feminine playthings -- dolls and miniature cookery sets and sewing-toys and the like -- but had instead been interested in boys' toys; guns and soldiers and detective games, and in boys' sports like football and baseball. Like the fact that she had always hated dainty dresses and underclothes, and had gone around in her brothers' castoffs, until her parents had insisted she start wearing only dresses. And like the fact that, while all her friends had giggled and whispered about boys and about the excitement they felt sitting next to these boys in class or at the movies, she felt nothing of the kind; but instead felt heat and excitement only once, and that when she had slept over at her girl friend's house and had touched the other girl's breasts and buttocks while she slept.
Ann got out of bed that night and, in the faint glow of the tiny night lamp, she took off her pajamas and stared at her naked body in the mirror. The sight reassured her, because her slim body was softly curved and very feminine, and her breasts were very large even full and upcurved and long-nippled. And she thought: Girls who like other girls are supposed to be mannish-looking, but I'm completely feminine. But she could not explain or understand the nausea which had filled her at the dark-haired boy's touch, contrasted with the excitement and pleasure which had raced through her when she had reached out guiltily at her friend's house and touched the sleeping girl's warm flesh.
The incident passed almost completely out of her mind as the days and weeks moved on, and she took a job as a secretary in a local law office and forgot everything else in her interest in her work. And then, suddenly and without warning, the experience repeated itself. Her employer, a prematurely-grey man in his early forties, asked her to work late one night, and at one point in the evening, having apparently mistaken her natural friendliness for invitation and her lovely, tight-sweatered figure for wantonness, suddenly stepped up to her as she stood with her back to him, and pressed his middle against her buttocks and put both his hands around her and on the curves of her sweater.
She pulled away from him and caught up her coat and ran out of the office, and did not even return for her pay. but she thought about that incident a great deal, too. Her employer had been a very handsome man despite the grey hair, and she was almost nineteen when the incident occurred and at an age when many girls were beginning to feel, overwhelmingly, the pangs of sexual awakening -- and yet she had experienced nothing but horror and revulsion. And in contrast to this, some of her friends had admitted to her frankly that they had deliberately sought out and invited sexual experiences, and enjoyed them immensely.
Twice more, in that small town in Wisconsin, the same thing had happened to her: both times when she had gone out with young men, strictly because her friends had begun to wonder and comment openly about what they called her "nunnishness." The first time, she ran away from the experience, as she had done with the dark-haired boy after the prom and with the lawyer; but the second time, in an incident which took place in Harrow Park at night, she forced herself to let the boy move his body on top of hers as she lay on the shimmering grass, and actually began to take her. And then she'd been unable to stand it any longer, and she'd clawed herself away from him and run blindly out of the park. She was violently and repeatedly sick once she got home.
She went out with no more men after that, and when the talk became too pointed in her household and in the narrow confines of the little town, she came to New York and got a job as executive secretary at the advertising agency at which she was still employed. Here, too, she had her problems, because her slim blonde loveliness brought on passes by almost every man in the agency, but she handled it by making it clear that she dated no men where she worked. And she avoided close friendships with the other girls in the office, too, so that no one would know that she dated no men away from the office, either.
She was twenty-four now, nearly twenty-five, and she had learned to accept and make-do with her own peculiar way of life. She went out with no men at all, but she approached no women either; she had no sex life at all. She had, in fact, just about managed to convince herself that she wasn't sexually inverted at all -- that she just had a dead spot toward sex in toto brought on perhaps by some innate fear of men or something of that sort. But it didn't really matter; she'd come to accept it in her own mind, because it didn't really bother her, and she could do without sex, thank you, for the rest of her natural life.
* * *
That evening of June 20th, she'd stopped after work and had a very pleasant dinner at a little French restaurant on West 53rd Street, and then she'd gone home to the Madison-Plaza and stretched out luxuriantly on her bed. Her secret problem was nowhere on or near her mind at all: she was wondering idly if she ought to try a ski lodge she'd seen advertised in the Sunday Times, wondering if she should go up there that coming week-end; and looking casually out of the window.
Her window faced another bank of windows in a new apartment building across the street, and she'd never before seen or noticed the people who lived in the apartment right across from her -- they'd just never happened to be near the window when she was looking out. And then, abruptly, Ann sat up on the edge of her bed and stared, her heart quickening inside her, because there was someone in the other apartment. There was a girl standing near the apartment's window now, and she was one of the most beautiful girls Ann had ever seen in her life.
The girl in the apartment was very young, no more than nineteen or so, and she had long dark hair, longer than Ann had ever seen on a girl before, reaching almost down to her knees. She had very dark eyes and very red lips, and she looked like a model or an actress. But the thing which held Ann's attention, and caused her breath to quicken, was that the girl was wearing only brassiere and panties, and even from across the areaway, Ann could see the whiteness of her full breasts as they seemed to pour forth from under the brassiere, and see the faint incurved shadow where the girl's legs met under the pants.
There had been times, over the past years, when Anne had awakened with the sudden fierce hunger to see other women's lovely bodies, partially disrobed or completely naked, and she had thought of places where this could be accomplished without arousing suspicion: places like the locker rooms at some of the hotel pools around town, or at the Y's, or at the many steam baths in the midtown area. But she'd always managed to fight off the hunger, turn away the desire -- until now. Now, she sat on the edge of her bed and stared out of the window as though hypnotized, watching the girl undress across the way; and as she watched her hands moved onto her own body, one hand cupping her own breast and squeezing it with increasing fierceness, and the other beginning to rub and stroke and caress the area where her legs met.
The girl across the way was obviously unaware of Ann's presence and not posturing deliberately or anything of that sort; she was merely undressing preparatory to taking a shower, and just forgetting that she was standing near an unshaded window. But the girl had a natural grace which made her movements become exciting even in her unawareness, and Ann's hands on her own body increased in frenzy as she watched.
The dark-haired girl stood near the window for a moment without moving, and then, very slowly, she reached behind her and found the clasp of her brassiere and opened it. The brassiere fell slowly away from her, but she did not remove it at once, letting it slide along the glistening white flesh of her breast toward her nipples. And then, when the brassiere had reached her nipples and hung there precariously, she pulled the brassiere off and tossed it somewhere out of Ann's sight. And then she moved her arms apart and took a deep breath, letting her breasts swell breathtakingly forward.
They were very large breasts; like Ann's, they were a little too large to be in absolute proportion with the rest of her slim body, but very beautiful nevertheless. They swept upward from her body in a firm, highpointed arc, rounded and full and yielding, and the long nipples which crowned them were as darkly red as her passionate mouth. And below her breasts, her belly was white and smooth and waved slightly with her breathing.
The girl remained at the window for a little while, bare-!breasted, but then she moved away and Ann felt sharp disappointment. The disappointment melted instantly away, however, because the girl was back almost at once; she had gone away only to get a comb and brush, and, as Ann watched, she faced a mirror on a bureau near the window and began to brush and comb her long, long hair.
She combed slowly and smoothly and in long strokes, moving her slender body a little so that her breasts moved and her nipples quivered gently, and the heat grew within Ann and became almost unbearable. Now, there was no longer any pretense, and as the dark-haired girl stood at the window and combed and brushed her hair for what seemed like hours, Ann stood up in her darkened room and began feverishly to remove her own clothing. She had worn a simple black business dress that day, and she pulled it quickly over her head. She opened her brassiere and tossed it aside, and then she pulled down her half-slip and pants, and stood there naked in the darkness except for her slippers and stockings.
The girl across the way had finished brushing and combing her hair now, and, like a belly-dancer doing a cooch dance, she suddenly began to twist her hips from side to side as she slid her pants down over her hips and then down her legs. And as Ann watched, the girl's pants disappeared onto the floor, somewhere and she, too, stood naked and facing Room 301 and Ann Went-worth.
She stood naked at the window for only a very little while before she moved away, permanently, from Ann's hungry view. It was probably less than a minute in all, but it was enough. In that minute, Ann's staring dark-blue eyes moved all over the dark-haired girl's loveliness -- over her beautiful face and her dark eyes and her red, red mouth and her long hair and her full, uppointed, long-nippled breasts and her flat stomach, and then more lingeringly over the delicate inturn where her legs met -- and she nearly went wild with hunger. Her desire for the other woman -- face it, her mind finally screamed, for the other woman -- was excruciating and unbearable.
And as the dark-haired girl finally moved away from the window and did not return. Ann tossed herself down on her bed, as though the girl were lying there beneath her, and she moved and twisted and writhed with the picture of the dark-haired girl's naked loveliness blazing within her mind. She moved her body up and down with increasing wildness, one hand clutching both her breasts and holding them rubbed together, and the other running over her buttocks, and then moving down. And in this way, her slim body a churning mass of wildness, she achieved fulfillment.
She lay very still on her bed for a long time after that, forced at last to admit to herself in plain language exactly what she was. It was nearly an hour later that the tears finally came. Deep, bitter, and racking.
* * *
There was no one at all in Room 302 that evening. The room's usual occupant, a twenty-year-old, redhead named Tim Halloran, was away from the Madison-Plaza and not, he'd told the desk, scheduled to return until well after midnight. He was in the company of some two hundred other men attending a fraternal function at the Midtown Clubhouse on West 44th Street.
The official purpose of the function was a New Members meeting, a get-together to welcome the eighteen men who had been admitted to the lodge that month: but the real attraction was the stag films which were shown after the business matters, which were usually quickly gotten out of the way. Tim worked as chief stock clerk at a refrigerator-parts firm on Tenth Avenue, and had been invited to the meeting -- more specifically, to the stag show afterward -- by a couple of the mechanics to whom he supplied parts. He came along with great reluctance, and only because he knew the men would kid him and make comments if he didn't.
His reluctance did not stem from the fact that he did not like stag films; on the contrary, he liked them almost too much. His reluctance resulted strictly from the fact that he was already over-stimulated toward, and over-hungry for, women, and he was secretly afraid of how much a stag showing might increase the ailment.
For, though Tim would never have admitted it to his friends and acquaintances in a million years, and had in fact fought three or four fights in the past year with other boys who accused him of it, he was a virgin. And though he was desperately anxious to alter this condition, and thought about it and agonized over it every waking minute of every day, he had no notion at all of how to go about it.
He had come to New York less than a year before from the little town of Croydon, Pennsylvania, population 437. And in the town of Croydon and the other towns which adjoined it, there had been no such things as willing girl friends or professional relievers-of-growing-boys. The little cluster of communities which included Croydon were controlled and dominated by a religious sect which believed strictly in marital relations between married people only, and hawklike attention was given both to the young feminine population who were growing up in the area and to the occasional outside dame who got the bright notion of moving in and doing a brisk little business.
So that left Tim and his friends with nothing to do about l'amour, except discuss it wistfully and from a distance, and they did so, practically without pause, through the years in which Tim's crowd was growing up. And in every one of these discussions, particularly those which were highlighted and improved by the passing around of smuggled-in girlie magazines or plain-speaking books or even photos of men and women in action, Tim found his throat tightening up and his tongue thickening and the hunger for relief threatening to burst out of his body.
He tried like hell, of course, despite the adverse conditions, and twice he almost succeeded -- but not quite. Once he managed to visit a girl named Alice when her parents were unexpectedly away, and he actually managed to coax her onto a couch and had moved feverishly on top of her. But then her father walked in and gave him one of the two worst beatings he had ever gotten in his life; and by the time he arrived home his father had been alerted by telephone and gave him the other worst beating of his life. And the other near-miss occurred when he met Alice on the street a couple of months later and talked her into strolling along the lonely riverside with him, despite the unofficial but well-known community edict against this -- but she chickened out halfway there and left him.
There were other efforts made, of course. Once, for example, Tim and four of his buddies piled into one of the boys' old jalop, and took off for an allegedly wide-open mining town nearly three hundred miles away. But when they got there, tired and shaken up but rarin' to go, they found that the bluenose element in the town had just staged a clean sweep and there wasn't a crib or a joint left open. So it was back to Croydon and the pictures and books hidden under mattresses.
By the time Tim was nineteen, he was in a state of perpetual heat, and he had come to realize that the only way he was going to be able to do anything about it, if he remained in Croydon, was to pick up some interesting-looking girl and court her in the accepted sober fashion and then marry her. This was the standard ritual encouraged by the town fathers, before bed, and several of Tim's friends had already succumbed to it in their anxiety and accessory to get themselves a little blessed relief. The only trouble as far as Tim was concerned was that, wild as he was with unsatisfied manhood, he just wasn't interested enough in any girl within sight to want to spend the rest of his life with her after that initial explosion of relief.
He decided to do something which seemed a whole lot sensible to him. He was an only child and had never felt particularly close to either his father or his mother, perhaps mostly because their sect tacitly discouraged a show of emotion and affection; so one morning he put on his best suit and packed a bag and took his savings and told his parents he was leaving. They asked him where he was going, and he said New York, and they expressed distaste and dismay, and he ignored their reaction and turned his back on them and left.
He chose New York, because the minister in his town had a habit of preaching horrified sermons about the town whenever they ran out of more pertinent topics, and the things which shocked the ministers about New York, sounded most appealing to Tim. The city, said the ministers, was full of drinking and night-clubbing and whoring. All that, Tim told himself each time he heard it, was strictly for him -- and particularly that last item.
He arrived in New York on a hot summer morning and got himself the room at the Madison-Plaza and the job at the refrigerator-parts plant the very same day. He kept the job because it paid pretty well and wasn't very hard, and he kept the room at the hotel, despite the fact that it was really too expensive for him, because it was such a pleasant and impressive place. But these two things were all he got, because New York, he soon learned, was like most other places: it was probably there, all right, but you gotta know exactly where and how.
He had plenty of spare time after work now, and he was strictly on his own, so he tried practically every night. He hit bars in practically every section of the city, and in outlying districts like Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, sticking around whenever there were lone dames in the place and ogling meaningfully at them; and he also leaped at the chance whenever one of his fellow-employees at the plant asked him to go on a double-date.
It was strictly no Palmolive.
It wasn't that he was a bad-looking kid; he was actually nice-looking. He had shot up into a gangling six-three, lean but not skinny, and he had the kind of red haired, freckled nice looks which gave him a strong resemblance to the young Van Johnson. Practically all the girls he took out on double dates liked him at first look, and even some of the lone women in the bars returned his stare.
But he was just too eager. In the bars, he practically worked over the women right there in public, instead of buying them a bunch of drinks and then easing them along to their place or his, so that they invariably ditched him within a few minutes; and on the double dates he was so emphatic and obvious in his suggestions that the two couples ought to separate and go it separately that the girls were put off and put on guard, and he ended with nothing.
After these dates, he frequently met, by pre-arrangement, with the other guy at an all-night beanery, and the usual question was asked. "How'd you make out?" said the friend.
"Great!" Tim always said. "Three times!"
"Ha!" the friends always said, knowingly, after which they separated and Tim went to his room at the Madison-Plaza to unburden himself in the manner which is ancient and widespread, but nothing at all like the real thing.
He got the. reputation around his place of being a guy strictly out of the know, and was even nicknamed No-Score Halloran when he wasn't around to hear it, but he was still well-liked by his co-workers and customers because he was a nice, amiable kid when he wasn't climbing all over some dame and trying to make it with her. And, usually, he was invited along when one of the fraternal clubhouses around town was having a stag showing; which happened frequently.
He never really wanted to go, despite the fact that he had been fascinated and excited by every stag film he'd ever seen: because, funny as his virginity might have been to his friends, it was no joke at all to him. It was a constant probing, hurting, never-ceasing gnawing within him day and night, and he knew that stimulation was wild enough within his body without the added stimulation of the films. But sex, to Tim Halloran, was as irresistible as it had been unattainable thus far, and this applied even to its side-products -- like illicit movies.
He invariably told the men who invited him that he didn't think he could make it because he had a date to get some of the real thing instead of just moving pictures, and then just as invariably he showed up at the clubhouses and ignored the grins thrown at him. And that was the case on the evening of June 20th.
The film was a good one -- one he hadn't seen before and fairly new and clear. It started with a guy and girl checking into a motel, and cut almost immediately to action inside the motel room, where the couple went through all the variations in the book. And the girl happened to be exactly Tim's type.
She was probably no older than Tim, perhaps twenty-one at the most, and she was rather tall and long-legged, and she had short blonde hair and dark eyes and very full, very firm breasts. She had worn no brassiere, no underwear at all when she entered the motel room, simply pulling her dress over her head and then standing there naked and facing the camera; and though it was obvious that she had been set up this way in order to get the film off to a fast start, Tim preferred to believe that she wasn't wearing a brassiere because she just didn't need one. In that, anyway, he was clearly correct, because the girl's breasts curved upward in a pointed sweep, held high even without support.
Tim watched, wide-eyed and fascinated, as the man, naked now, sat down on the edge of the bed and the girl sat down on the man's lap, facing him, her breasts rubbing lightly against the man and her long, Slim legs dangling on each side of him. And secretly, in the darkness, Tim's hands slipped into his pockets as he watched.
On the screen, the man and the woman kissed rightly and then with increasing fierceness, and the man's hands moved onto the girl's body, one hand clutching her soft buttocks and the other squeezing her right breast and fingering her long, dark nipple. The girl began to move under the man's caresses, her buttocks swaying from side to side against him and her breasts shaking and her mouth caressing the man's face and his ears. And in his seat, Tim moved a little, too, his body simulating the action on the screen, the desire within him flaming-hot and bursting.
The man on the screen had moved his head down now and had caught the girl's breast with his lips, kissing it and biting the nipple, and Tim's green eyes widened at the sight. He watched breathlessly as the man continued to caress and kiss the breast, and then his hands tightened on his own body as the girl slipped off the man's lap after a while and kneeled in front of him and her lovely face caressed him in turn.
The man quickly moved as the girl did this, and the girl's blonde head began to bob, and the man's body tightened visibly and he put his hands on the girl's hair and began to stroke her, and the camera moved forward for a close-up look.
Some of the men in the room laughed, but Tim gasped audibly as he watched the girl's head move and saw the genuine look of excitement on her face. The girl continued to love the man, sometimes moving away, but always returning.
Then suddenly, the man lay back on the bed, and the girl moved quickly onto the bed herself, placing her body on top of the man's, but in the direction opposite to his. The man put his face to the girl's body, and his hands caught hold of her white buttocks and pressed her hard against him. For a long time after that they made love to each other.
Finally, the girl moved away from the man, a lazy smile of invitation on her face. At once, the man loomed over her, and she lifted high off the bed, and he joined her. The girl tightened convulsively around the man's body, and they began to crash against each other in the spasms of love.
Again the camera panned closer for a lead-on look, picking up the movements of the man and woman, and again Tim's gasp mixed with some bursts of nervous laughter in the big auditorium. It was as though he were all alone now; he did not even hear the others. And it seemed to him that the sensations within him were the strangest and cruelest imaginable: this mixture of pleasure and excitement at what he was seeing combined with the pain and agony of a hunger which had never been satisfied.
There were other positions after that, and one of (he men commented on it. "No guy on earth has stamina like that," he said to Tim. "They probably made that film over a lot of days." Tim hardly heard it, and did not answer; he could not be as offhand and impersonal as that about what he was watching. He continued to stare at the film, and at the others which followed, in complete fascination.
And when the show was over, he was so filled with agony and hunger that he left the fraternal clubhouse with only the barest of goodbyes for his friends.
He did not know, exactly, where he was rushing, but there was a cab outside and he jumped into it. The cab pulled away from the curb at once, moving into the stream of traffic, and then the driver half-turned his head toward Tim, waiting for instructions. Tim did not speak at once. He had entered the cab strictly on impulse, remembering some dim stories to the effect that New York cabbies could always take you to a dame; but now that the moment was here, he found himself tongues-tied and unable to come out with it. It was only when the cabbie began to stare at him that he finally spoke.
His words poured out in a rush, spoken so fast that he almost hoped that what he said was unintelligible. "Can you take me to a joint?" he asked.
There was a red light on the corner, and the driver pulled up to it without answering. Then he said, "A who?"
Tim felt blood beginning to rush into his face, and he had. to fight to get the words out. "A -- a joint," he said, finally. "I'd like -- "
"I'm not in that of business," the driver said, cutting him off. "I just drive people around town for nine hours a day, and then I go home to my wife and four kids. You been hearing the wrong kind of stories, sonny. You want me to drop you off at this corner?"
The blood was so hot in Tim's face now that he felt as if he were on fire. He remembered suddenly that he'd been told that only some hackies will help you get yourself a bim, and that you've got to offer those drivers an added inducement like a ten-spot, not just expect to be steered for the tab on the meter alone; but he just didn't have the nerve to pursue the matter in that direction. As the light changed to green, he managed to say only, "Forget it. Take -- take me to the Madison-Plaza, over on Park."
He hardly slept at all that night.
There's no point in speculating on how Tim Hal-loran might have reacted to the knowledge of the girl who lived in the room next along the corridor to his, Room 303, because he was completely unaware of her existence. She had moved into the Madison-Plaza only two days before, and he'd never happened to meet her in the hallway or in the elevator or see her going in and out of her room.
Her name was Liz Lawrence.
The chances are that he would have reacted enthusiastically to the knowledge of her presence, and probably would have started to put together some clumsy plan to get her to invite him into her room, because she was even more his type than the girl in the stag film. She was a little younger than the girl in the film, just nineteen, and even prettier, but she was the same physical type. She was fairly tall, a couple of inches or so above average, and very long-legged in an attractively coltish kind of way, and she had short feather-cut blonde hair and serious brown eyes and a straight little nose and a faintly-pouting red mouth.
Her figure, too, was very beautiful; Tim would have had no doubt about that if he had been able to look through the wall which separated his room and hers; because, at the time he left the cab and entered his room and undressed and threw himself disconsolately into his bed, she lay across hers completely naked. Her body was very slender and her waist was very small, but her hips were femininely wide and her buttocks were full and outthrust and her breasts were very large and high-curved.
There was one more thing about her which would have excited Tim most of all if he had known about it.
The girl in the room next to his was as much in need of the relief of love as he was. That was why she now lay naked on the bed with her hands moving slowly and caressingly all over herself, a ritual which had become an almost nightly affair during the past two years.
Curiously enough, there were other similarities between the two of them, the tall red-haired boy and the tall blonde girl. Liz, too, had left home because of an excess of need for physical love and a shortage of affection on the part of her parents. That shortage too, had been the direct result of her parents' membership in a religious sect which preached temperance and control even in such matters as the showing of love for one's child. There were differences, of course: the Lawrences belonged to a sect entirely different from the Hallorans', and Liz's home had been in a relatively big city --Marsh City, Kansas, rather than Croydon, Pennsylvania But she, too, had been driven away from home because of the narrowness of outlook surrounding her, and she too; had come to New York because of its much-publicized freedom.
And the reasons for Liz's lack of physical fulfillment were, naturally, also different. Unlike Tim and unlike his struggle just to find a girl willing to take a chance in the rigid Croydon community, there had been no shortage of willing takers for a girl as beautiful as Liz, particularly after she had made it clear in whispered conversations at school and elsewhere that she was ready to give it all a whirl. But even mutual willingness requires place and opportunity, and Liz's parents took care of that.
Perhaps they sensed the growing restlessness and budding wantonness in their daughter; or perhaps they suspected none of this at all but moved automatically along the lines set down in the rule-books. In any case, they never let Liz go out on a date in the company of less than two other couples, and they never let her come home later than midnight even on Saturday dates, and they proscribed rigidly the places to which her date would take her and the manner of their return trip so that there was no opportunity for even a quick side-stop. The result was that Liz's bouts with the opposite gender were limited to a quick hand on the breast over the dress, or a hand slipped down onto the buttocks, and then pulled quickly away again.
And after each date, Liz formed the habit of taking off all her clothes in the darkness and privacy of her room and using her own hands as her lover. And as the weeks and months passed and she remained, against her will, virginal, she had reached the point where it no longer required the stimulus of a date and some hasty male touches to do it: she felt need all the time and made love to herself nearly every night.
Unlike Tim, too, she did not tell her parents she was leaving, once she had reached the decision to move to New York. She knew that they would make a lot of noise about it, possibly even try to ring in the police; and though she was a year past eighteen and could still leave despite whatever they tried to do, there was just no point in roiling the waters. She had saved up nearly a thousand dollars from her allowance and the salary earned at her job in a smart little dress shop, and she merely packed her bags when her father was at work and her mother out for an hour, and then she took a train and then a plane.
The plane landed at LaGuardia on a bright, sunny morning, and she left her bags at a drop in Grand Central Terminal after a taxi had brought her into the city, and she went directly from there to one of the swankiest stores on Fifth Avenue, Marks'. She applied at the personnel office for a job as a salesgirl, giving as experience the year in the store in Kansas; but the personnel director took one look at her fresh young beauty and put her on as a model at nearly twice a salesgirl's salary.
That same day, another of the models told her that the Madison-Plaza was a nice place to live, and she retrieved her bags and moved in there that night.
But now a couple of days had passed, and she was still no nearer to her dream of abandoned freedom; except for the change in location, and the difference between the beautiful room at the Madison-Plaza and her cramped little room back in Marsh City, she might as well have been back at home. She still went to work at eight-fifteen in the morning, still came home alone at night at six-thirty, and still went to bed alone and comforted herself in her long-established manner.
There had already been opportunities of course -- she'd cast a few interested glances at some nice-looking boys on the street, and they'd cast more than a few back at her. And some of these had been just her type. too. She liked the tall, lanky, clean-cut type, preferably with blond or red hair and with a few freckles scattered across the face. But here the Kansas in her got in the way, despite her wild dreams of freedom, because the boys were apparently afraid to do more than look at her, and she in turn could not bring herself to do what she characterized in her own mind as "trashy and forward" -- that is, let them know somehow that she was ready to be picked up. So she went to bed alone and lay there naked and with her hands on herself, and even afterward she did not sleep very well or very much that night.
It was ironic, naturally, that she and Tim Halloran lived right next door to each other, had the same needs and hungers, were each other's physical types, and could have complemented and fulfilled each other perfectly if each had been aware of the other's existence. But the irony is unimportant, because the simple fact is that they were not aware of each other on that night of June 20th.
CHAPTER THREE
That night was the night for urges at the Madison-Plaza, and in the next room along the corridor, Room 304, the hunger which was suddenly born within the woman who lived there was so strong that it woke her out of a sound and deep sleep. When it happened, she sighed deeply and lay there for a moment without opening her eyes, and then she turned and opened one eye and looked at her little diamond wristwatch lying on the night-table alongside her bed.
She sighed again, a half-groan really, when she saw that it was 1:30 in the morning. This kind of sudden awakening had happened to her often before -- it was, in fact, beginning to happen with frightening frequency lately -- but never before quite so late. And that was going to make it tough. It was one thing for a woman to wander into a bar or one of the small night club at ten o'clock or even eleven o'clock at night, but a lady looked conspicuous turning up at two or so in the morning.
Nevertheless, it had to be done: she knew herself all too well, so that was all there was to that. Already her breath was beginning to be little shallow and excitement was beginning to course through her body, just at the thought that she'd soon be going out and picking herself up a lean, tough, hard-muscled man; already she could feel the slight swelling of her breasts and the slight hardening of her nipples, things which happened to other women when they were already in a man's arms but which had taken place in her since her sixteenth birthday just at the thought.
She knew what she was, all right, just a surely as she knew that her name was Jane Matthews. She was a nympho, and she had long ago learned to live with the fact and with the demands it made on her.
That didn't make it all any the less frightening, of course. The first time it had happened, right at her own sweet sixteen party, she had been absolutely terrified. There had been absolutely no warning at all: one minute she had been dancing around and flitting around with nothing on her mind except the completely innocent fun she was having, and the next minute she had felt this strange itching burning, searing sensation right in what her laborer-father had always piously called her "private parts." And even as she had first felt it, it had begun to spread and increase and multiply through her entire body with the ravaging speed of a forest fire, and she'd known immediately, somehow known instinctively, that the only way she could find relief would be by letting a man take her at once.
It was the craziest, most unthinkable thing that had ever happened to her in her young life, and yet she knew exactly what she had to do almost as though it were an often-repeated experience. She was dancing with a boy when the sensation first began to build within her, a boy she barely knew and hadn't even particularly liked until that moment, but she danced him almost wildly into one of the darkened bedroom -- and then she kicked the door shut and she dropped down on the bed and pulled the boy down with her.
She was able to remember the expression on the boy's face for many years afterward: the look of bewilderment and confusion, and then the look of sudden eagerness. He had not bothered with subtleties after that; he had simply lifted her frilly white party dress and pulled off her pants, and that he had opened his zipper and plunged at her in one harsh, stabbing thrust -- despite the fact that this was her first time. She could still remember the knife-sharp sensation of pain, and the fact that she had cried out. But then the searing sensation had left her and been replaced by the most delightful feeling of pleasure she had ever experienced and she had thrown her legs and arms around the boy's thrusting body, and together they had twisted and ground into completion.
Afterward, she was terrified with herself and terrified with what had happened: terrified at what she had done, and at the fact that she had done it almost within earshot of the other people at the party, and at the fact that the door had been shut but not locked and anyone at all might have wandered in at any moment, and at the fact that her parents were right in the kitchen just a few doors away. But, mixed with her terror was her certain feeling that she had done the right thing, because now the burning, overwhelming sensation was gone and she felt only complete happiness and contentment.
Miraculously, she'd soiled only her half-slip, and, since the room into which she'd taken the boy happened to be her own bedroom, she was able to put on a fresh half-slip and push the soiled one under a bunch of other clothes to be secretly retrieved and thrown out at some later, more convenient moment. By the time she had finished changing her slip, the occurrence on the bed had already begun to seem so wild and remote that it was almost as though it had never really happened, and she pushed the boy aside when he put his arms around her and indicated his willingness for another session, and they walked out together into the living room. And by the end of the party, she was so completely herself again that, when the boy stopped on his way out and asked when he'd see her again, she stunned him by saying blandly that she was sorry but he just wasn't her type, and then she turned away from him.
But the strange sensation returned again, and many times again, and at those times anybody was her type-- That first time, she faced a lot of kidding from her friends about the way she'd fallen for that boy, and a lot of exciting questions about what really went on in that bedroom -- but she managed to shrug it all off with a smile; She said that it had all been a joke and they'd just sat there in the darkness laughing and giggling; and when her friends told her later on that the boy had been whispering around that she was easy, she dismissed his statement contemptuously as a silly he.
But it wasn't quite as easy to explain away the second time, when the sensation hit her at a picnic, and she moved off with a boy into the deep woods and was gone with him for nearly two hours. And it was less easy the third time, when she went off for an entire evening in a car with two boys, and they later boasted that they'd both had her, and repeatedly at that. And after the fourth time, she didn't even try.
She was living in Los Angeles then, in a fairly tough and rundown neighborhood, and, in that neighborhood, girls who were willing and available were quickly passed around: In only a matter of months, Jane had been had, usually frequently, by just about every un-married male around and a good third of the married ones. And. in time, even her parents heard about it.
It must be said for them that, despite the fact that her father was only a laborer and had very limited funds, they tried everything. They started with the usual beatings and recriminations and threats, but when Jane told then tearfully that she just couldn't help herself and went right on doing what she was doing, they even took her to a doctor. But, unfortunately for all of them, the doctor was a doddering old incompetent who told them that some girls were just promiscuous that way and it wasn't a medical problem, and all he could do was express sympathy for them.
And so, it continued. In less than a year, she changed from a sweet and innocent and popular girl, with a million girl friend, to an ever-willing floozie (free-of-charge variety) with no girl friends at all, partly because her friends' parents began to forbid them from seeing her and partly because she was too busy with the boys. She was a frequent guest at the neighborhood cellar clubs on those nights when the clubs were closed to the general public, and she became known as an all-directions girl: lying on her back, lying on her stomach, and kneeling with her lips apart. On some nights, she accommodated as many as a dozen boys and men.
A month before her seventeenth birthday, Jane, who had been neglecting her studies so completely that she was failing in almost every subject at her high school, suddenly began to bring home suspiciously high marks in mathematics. Her parents, bewildered and suspicious went to the school and voiced their suspicions to the principal, and in no time at all the principal put a watch on Jane and found that she had been getting her good grades by staying frequently after school and accommodating her relatively young mathematics teacher. The teacher went to the can for two years, and Jane was sent to an institution for wayward girls for an indefinite term.
She escaped from the institution less than a month later; it wasn't hard because the place was so overcrowded that the people who ran it practically turned their backs in open encouragement whenever one of the girls began to talk like a potential escapee. She left Los Angeles that same night, and had not been back there since. She worked her way across the country little by little, staying in a town for a month or two and working as a waitress or a salesclerk during the day and spending almost every night in a different man's bed. She landed in New York when she was twenty.
That had been a long time ago, more than a dozen years ago, and now she was more than twice the age she'd been back on the West Coast when her hunger had struck her for the first time. She had grown from a gentle, wide-eyed, dark-haired little girl to a sophisticated woman of thirty-two nearly thirty-three, who now wore her dark hair in a sophisticated upsweep and who wore extremely expensive clothes and just a shade too much makeup and who looked as if she'd been born on Park Avenue instead of being an escapee to it, She was here for good now. She had gone to work as a junior clerk in a Second Avenue antique store and eventually worked her way up to the point where she was able to buy out the owner and take over the place. The rental of her room at the Madison-Plaza was nothing at all to her. She made enough money now, in fact, to have rented a suite rather than a room in the place, but she liked Room 304, and was used to it -- and, as she frequently told herself wryly. "All I really need is a place with a bed in it, anyway."
Her overwhelming passion was still with her, even after this sixteen-almost-seventeen years, and it was actually growing stronger. She had hoped at first that it would diminish after a while, or at least become controllable as to time and place, because, despite her brave front, she had never really been very proud of her constant role of neighborhood put-out, but that had not been the case at all. The wild need had continued to hit her regularly and increasingly, even waking her up as it had done tonight, and all she had learned to do through the years was to give in to it without struggle and try to do it away from her place of business so that her employees and friends would not know what she was.
And so, on the night of the 20th, she sighed when she saw that it was 1:30 in the morning, and then she got out of bed and slipped out of her pajamas, her body already tingling so violently with need and hunger that she found herself sliding her hands along her breasts and buttocks and down to the area where her legs met even as she began to dress.
She put on a frilly pair of black pants and a thin, almost transparent black brassiere, and she did not bother with a slip at all; she merely put on a tight, low-cut black dress over it. Both her brassiere and her dress were so very low-cut that the full white mounds of her breasts showed daringly almost to the nipples, and these hunting garments were so non-typical of the clothes she wore in her store that she had a ready-made answer in the event she ran into one of her employees or one of her regular customers: I've put on as little as possible because the night is so darn hot. That's why I'm wandering around, too -- I just couldn't sleep." None of this, of course, explained the other enormously noticeable aspects of her clothes -- the fact that her dress was so tight that it hugged her buttocks and showed her cleavage clearly, but the story would just have to do.
She was, she knew without false modesty as she caught up her handbag and prepared to leave her room, a very good-looking woman and a bit of luck for the man who ended up with her that night Her upswept hairdo was very becoming, and her eyes were still very large and wide and made more attractive by the mascara and the blue shadow on her eyelids, and she had a good, slightly turned-up nose, and a very passionate mouth. And her body was still as lovely as that of any girl of twenty.
She was very slim, just barely missing thinness, and her very large breasts looked enormous in contrast with the slightness of her frame. Many men had commented on the loveliness of her breasts as they lay with her in bed -- on their well-shaped fullness and the fact that they curved upward so beautifully without sag, and on the length and redness of her nipples and the soft pink-ness of the circlet around her nipples -- and her breasts looked almost as provocative under her tight dress. The rest of her was equally as beautiful: her waist was small and her hips were rounded; her buttocks were full and her long legs were straight and well-shaped.
The heat was growing within her as she left her room and took the elevator down to the lobby, every movement of her body, and particularly the way her legs rubbed together where they met, making more desperate her need and hunger. By the time the doorman had flagged a cab for her and she'd gotten in it, she was so much on fire that she was almost ready to direct the cabbie, nondescript and uninteresting as he was, to take her to a lonely spot down by the waterfront, and have him stop the cab there and proposition him.
But she held herself back. It took tooth-clenching strength and effort to maintain her control, but she kept telling herself that she was a responsible business-woman of thirty-three, and not a wild slum-neighborhood kid any more, and she finally managed to tell the cabbie to let her off at Lexington and Thirty-Eighth. This was the Murray Hill section, a good neighborhood with a lot of bars which she hadn't over patrolled lately.
She entered the first bar less than a minute after she left the cab, steeling herself for the curious looks she knew the bartender would start throwing her because of the lateness of the hour, despite the fact that she was obviously better-dressed and more high-grade looking than a wandering hooker. The look came as expected, but she ignored it and slipped onto a stool and ordered a champagne cocktail.
While the drink was coming, she looked casually around her -- and it wasn't any good. The other people in the bar were all couples; the only lone male in the bar was the bartender, and she'd learned long ago to stay away from that breed. It wasn't that they were any less virile or willing than other men, but they invariably took her for a high-class pro and became desperately afraid of losing their liquor license. She knew, because she'd tried bartenders three times in the last couple of years, and each time she'd narrowly avoided getting herself arrested.
She left the bar immediately after she'd finished her drink, but she had no better luck in the next couple of places: one was completely deserted except for the bartender on this midweek night, and the other only a single couple. And the place after that yielded nothing, either.
And now she became almost like a wild woman, or like a drug addict who was hours behind a fix. Her body trembled visibly, she felt a feeling almost of nausea mixing with the burning, blistering sensation around her middle, and she had to fight to hold the tears back. She began to walk rapidly west, her high heels clicking loudly on the deserted streets, hurrying toward the Times Square area because the bars there had action later than those on the East Side.
She didn't like the Times Square area because some of the bartenders knew what she was, and had the habit of sneering whenever she walked into the place; but this was no time to be particular, because some of the regular patrons also knew her, and would claim her and leave with her the moment she showed up. But her luck was unbelievably bad here, too: she hit bar after bar along Broadway, and not one yielded anything for her. Not even her frequent standby, a willing sailor -- or, more appropriately in her present need, a group of sailors.
And now she was really sick: her hand shook so hard at the last bar that she could hardly hold the glass, and every sip of her drink made her want to throw up. And finally, in desperation, she walked quickly over to 42nd Street and bought a ticket for the first all-night fleabag movie theatre she reached.
Because here, she knew, she could always get herself someone. These theatres served more as a meeting-place for all the dregs of the town than as a place in which to see a couple of movies. And among the derelicts who crawled into these theatres to confab with each other and to get a little sleep out of the way of the "Move on!" shouts of the cops, and the fruits who lisped blissfully at each other, and the various other weirdos, there were also always a sprinkling of very low-grade and low-priced hookers who used the 42nd Street theatres as their sales offices -- and these hookers attracted a fair attendance of men who couldn't afford anything better. These men weren't much; they were, in fact, pretty crummy individuals and generally well along in years, but they were men.
And Jane was certain, even with the agony which had gripped her slim body and was also clouding her mind, that she could outclass the pros and take away one of their potential customers any day in the week -- particularly since, she added to herself with that habit of knocking herself a little in so many of her thoughts, she was offering it for free.
She moved quickly into the theatre, and, as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she began to look around her as she walked down the aisle. She skipped one section completely: that, she knew from the twittering and the camping, was the swish contingent, and they wouldn't oblige her if she offered to pay for it. She moved a little further down the aisle, and as she went skipped a smaller section which housed mostly sleeping bums: they were just too beat-up and too weak to have any interest in doing what she wanted. And then, suddenly, she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at a man who sat almost alone in a row near the front of the theatre -- and then she moved at once into the same row and took the seat right next to him.
And she thought, as she sat down. Perhaps the night won't be a complete fiasco after all. Because the man represented still another type who occasionally turned up at the 42nd Street theatres, a type which shown up only very rarely and then came there strictly by accident.
This was the type Jane had long ago labelled in her mind as the "lost tourist": the out-of-town visitors who just happened to be passing and noticed the marquee and went inside because he hadn't seen the pictures being shown. It was easy enough to spot these isolated cases: they were very nearly the only people in the place actually watching the movie.
This man next to her was one of those, and, as Jane sat down, her heart had begun to pound so hard that it hurt her. It wasn't that the man was so terrific-looking, so staggeringly handsome. He truly wasn't; he looked like a small-time salesman of something dull like corsets or wheel chairs, and he had on a glen-plaid suit which was the tanktown version of Robert Hall, and he had too much Alberto-VO in his thick, curly black hair, and he had a hairline moustache which made him look greasy in this smooth-shaven era. He was, in fact, just the kind of small-town Charlie that Jane would have avoided if only social intercourse had been involved, but right now he was heaven to her because he was no more than her own age and he looked strong and well-muscled, and he looked normal compared to the rest of the creeps in the place.
She forced herself to sit still and watch the picture for nearly five minutes, and then, very gently, she moved her leg against the man's. Almost immediately, the man pulled his leg away.
His movement shocked her, and she forgot that she wanted to maintain an outward appearance of watching the picture, and she turned toward him and stared. It had suddenly occurred to her that, even though he didn't look like one, this man might be a fugail who had just happened to get separated from the swishes in the back -- certainly his rapid withdrawal from the warm pressure of a slim feminine leg suggested something like that. But as she looked at him, noticing that he had a good, lean-handsome face and a good strong jawline, despite the 'Hey, Rube' suit and the goop on his hair and the thin moustache, she realized that that was not it. the withdrawal was an automatic action because he was apparently so absorbed in the picture that he might have thought that he'd accidentally put his leg against hers.
She waited another half minute, and then she put her leg back against his, and this time she emphasized her presence by putting her leg movement, rubbing herself a little against his calf and thigh. This time she got immediate results: she felt his body stiffen, and then his arm dropped between them and his hand touched her ankle almost as though unintentionally.
She gave him instant encouragement of the most direct sort: she put her hand on his lap and fumbled for him and held him, and then she found his zipper and pulled it down. And now the man was no longer interested in the movie at all.
She saw him half-turn his head to look her over, and she knew by the sudden shine in his eyes that he liked what he saw. She watched his eyes travel over her well-shaped legs and her slim waist and stop at her very big breasts, gleaming white and half-exposed in her low-cut dress, and then his hand had moved up her leg and under her dress and onto her thigh. She moved her legs quickly, already feeling the beginnings of relief at his touch, and his fingers found her and began to probe her gently. And as she felt him do this, she moved her hand and held his body and began to caress him, too.
They held each other this way for a few minutes, increasing in speed as they continued. And then, abruptly, Jane turned her beautiful face toward the man, and she put her hot mouth against his ear, and she said, very softly. "Let's get out of here."
The man seemed startled at what she said; he did not move from his seat, and his fingers stopped their movement under her dress. He said very slowly, his accent thickly Southern, "I don't have very much money. How much will it cost?"
His stillness had frightened Jane, because she'd thought that he'd somehow suddenly lost interest or had become nervous at her suggestion and his question made her almost limp with relief. "It won't cost anything," she said quickly. "I'm not -- I'm just lonely."
"Well, now," the man said, and he suddenly looked very handsome as he smiled and showed white teeth against his tanned skin. "I think we can take care of that." And they stood up and left the theatre together.
* * *
The couple who had just checked into 305-6 at the Madison-Plaza had romance on their minds, too, but there was nothing surprising about that. Suite 305-6 was the Madison-Plaza's bridal suite, and the couple had been married exactly one hour and forty-seven minutes.
Their names were Kenny and Emily Norris, and they made a cute-looking couple. They were both just barely twenty-one, and they both had brown eyes and black hair, Emily's worn full and softly waved in the Jacqueline manner and Kenny's cut in a crew style so severe that his head looked almost shaved. Their figures were attractive, too: Kenny was solid without being heavy and had very broad shoulders and had played halfback on his high-school football team, and Emily was slim but had very good breasts and very nice-looking legs.
Their marriage ceremony a couple of hours before hadn't been very much. They'd been planning a Sunday church wedding with all the trimmings, but then Kenny had suddenly gotten his draft call and they'd decided to get married at once before he'd left; which was why they'd settled for a quick knot-tie at City Hall and then a small Wednesday night reception. But that was the only part of it which wasn't completely wonderful: aside from that, they were a well-matched couple, they loved each other truly and deeply, and they were both secretly glad that they were getting at each other somewhat sooner than originally planned.
They were members of that relatively rare tribe, a couple who had been engaged for nearly a year and had still managed to hold off consummation until their marriage. It had been a struggle, and they'd had their hands all over every inch of each other, and had performed every preliminary act in the book, but they both had deeply ingrained scruples about what they called "the real thing" and had succeeded in saving It. But tonight, anyway, was the night.
They had been in the suite only about ten minutes, opening a bottle of champagne presented to them by the Madison-Plaza management and sipping at the tall glasses also provided when Emily said, a little archly, "I'm awfully sleepy."
"So am I," Kenny said quickly, and as if at a signal they both put their glasses down and got up and walked over to the bed and lay down together across it.
Kenny made the first move: he moved his mouth down on Emily's and kissed her very gently, almost reverently. He was amazed at the fierceness of her response. Her kiss in return was far more bruising and crushing than his, and she took his hand and put it on her dress at her breast.
Immediately, Kenny caught fire, and he put his hand inside her dress and caught hold of her soft, yielding breast and began to squeeze it; and he took his other hand and put it in back of her and under her and found the zipper which held her little white wedding-dress closed. He pulled the zipper all the way down, and then h. reached forward and caught hold of her dress and pulled it so that it fell away from her to the waist.
He was half-raised as he did this, leaning over her and looking down at her, and she looked up at him with her eyes shining, young and virginal and in love and waiting. Her white slip, dazzlingly new for the occasional, showed beautifully the full curve of her brassiere and breasts underneath it, and after a moment he pulled her slip away, too, so that it fell to her waist. And then only her lacy brassiere covered her upper body.
Her breasts were not new to him; he had, in the course of their engagement, held them and caressed them and squeezed them and stroked them many times, and he had even had his mouth on them twice. But things were different tonight: this was Mrs. Kenny Norris, the brand-new Mrs. Kenny Norris, lying there before him, and it was as though he had never touched her before.
Again there was almost reverence in his movement, as he reached out and found the clasp of her brassiere, and he took more time than was necessary with it, fumbling and straining before he managed to get it open. And then he had released the brassiere, and pulled it away from her lovely shoulders and from her body, and her breasts were there before his eyes.
For an instant, Emily moved her arm as though to cover herself, an instinctive gesture, and then she thought better of it and put her arms at her sides and proudly, unashamedly, let him look at her. He did so in open admiration.
It was a curious thing to realize in view of the fact that he had had his hand on her breasts so often, and had even had his mouth there, but this was the first time he had the opportunity to take a real look, at length and without haste. All those other times, it had either been while they were parked in his car and afraid the police might come along and chase them, or in his home or hers and afraid their parents might suddenly come into the room, and there had always been an air of haste, of stealth, about it. Even the two times she had let him take her breast into his mouth, it had been a wonderful sensation for both of them, but they had stopped quickly because they were afraid someone would happen along and they wouldn't be able to cover her up in time.
But tonight there was no rush at all; now they had all night and, for that matter, all week, because he had seven days before he had to report for duty. And sp Kenny continued to stare at Emily's beautiful breasts, at their fullness and uprightness and at the deep-red of her nipples, and he stared for a long time while Emily reached up and stroked his face with her soft, small hand.
Then, very tentatively, Kenny reached down, and he put a hand under her left breast and cupped it, lifting it a little and tightening his fingers around it. And as his grasp became very tight, he began to shake the breast and stroke the long, hardening nipple with the tips of his fingers.
Then he moved his mouth down again and put it on Emily's soft lips, and, as they kissed fiercely and their tongues joined inside Emily's mouth, he spread his fingers apart so that they covered both her breasts. He fingered both her nipples for a few moments, and then he caught hold of both her breasts in a single grasp and began to squeeze and rub them together.
He heard Emily gasp in increased passion, and she reached down suddenly and touched his trousers-belt. He shifted his body position to give her greater access, and, as he kissed her and squeezed her breasts, he felt her open his belt and finally her hand had found his body and she began to caress him.
Now it was his turn to gasp, and, as he did so, he moved his hips away from hers and slid it along her slender throat and down to her breasts. He released one breast and lifted the other up toward his mouth, and he took the nipple into his mouth. He began to bite it gently and caress it, and he felt her hand tighten on him and her movements increase. His increased in excitement, too; he bit her nipple harder and ran his tongue more and more quickly around her nipple and around the pink circlet surrounding it.
Holding her breast that way, he began to squeeze it with his teeth, and he caught hold of her other breast and shook it wildly, and again Emily's pressure tightened on his body. And for a long time, they held and caressed each other.
Then, suddenly, Emily's pressure became unbearable in its marvelousness, and Kenny pulled away from her and stood up alongside the bed. He saw that Emily was watching him with a fascination which matched his as he looked at her breasts, and a sudden rush of blood colored his face, but he did not slow down as he began to undress.
He had taken off his white dinner-jacket when they'd first entered the suite, and he pulled off the black tie and then unbuttoned and took off his fancy ruffled shirt. Then he took off his T-shirt and felt overwhelmingly and boyishly proud of his rippling muscles.
He had to pause in his undressing, then; he had to lie down on the bed again and press his naked chest against Emily's high-pointed breasts. They put their arms around each other and held each other tightly when he did this, and their lips met again, and for a long time they kissed. But then he jumped back onto the thick carpet of the floor again, and as Emily watched him solemnly, he stood up and opened his trousers, which he'd automatically closed a little while before when he'd first stood-up to remove his shirt and tie and undershirt, and he left the trousers slip to the floor and he stepped out of them.
Then, with an almost defiant gesture, he pulled off his shorts and stood there, before her.
It was, he was positive, the first time she had ever seen a naked man, except perhaps her father when she was a very little girl, and he stood there and let her look at him, feeling a kind of curious pride in the way she stared wide-eyed and in the way the up-and-down movements of her breast increased as her breathing quickened. And then, after a while, he stepped over to her and pulled her slip and her dress the rest of the way down and off her body.
She lay there, then, completely naked except for her transparent pants and her stockings, because she had kicked off her shoes when they'd first sat down to sip the champagne. And it was almost as though she was completely revealed to him. And it seemed to him suddenly that he would die if he did not join this girl, his wife, at once.
He knelt down quickly and rolled her stockings down her legs and off, and then, his breathing loud and gasping in the silent room, he caught hold of her pants and pulled them over her full buttocks and down her legs and off. And then there was no barrier at all between their bodies.
She was everything to him suddenly, his entire life and everything wonderful that would ever be in it, lying there with her beautiful breasts rising and falling with her passionate breathing, and with the feminine loveliness waiting for him. He moved suddenly onto the bed so that he was over her, his body looming over hers but not yet touching her, and her arms caught hold of his shoulders.
She said, very softly. "Don't hurt me, Kenny." And as she said it, a very strange thing happened. He found himself staring at her mouth as she said it, staring at the softness and redness and beauty of her mouth, and the downward movement of his body stopped abruptly in mid-air. And he changed direction and moved forward, sliding against her belly and her breasts and then pressing hard against her lips.
He was not prepared for what happened next. The movement had been so entirely a matter of impulse that it had not even occurred to him that she might refuse him; and if it had, he would have assumed that her refusal would have been temporary and momentary and easily overcome because what he wanted seemed to him to be natural part of life.
Emily reacted, instead, with a violence which shocked and stunned him. A sound like a wild cry of pain escaped her lips, and she turned her head away in a kind of agony, and then she pushed him away with all her force and had jumped off the bed on the other side.
And as he remained frozen, staring at her paper-white face and her trembling slenderness, she said, her voice low and strangely dead. "You animal!" He did not know, of course, he had no way of knowing, that she had always regarded what he'd wanted as an act of bestiality and abnormality, despite the statements in every book on love and marriage to the effect that nothing is abnormal if both partners agree to do it. And not knowing it, he tried to make light of it, tried to grin at her, and he stepped off the bed on her side and moved toward her.
But she moved back away from him, and she said, in that same strange, dead voice, "Stay away from me!" And then she moved quickly around the bed and had caught up her clothes, and, before he could move toward her again, she ran into the next room and he heard the door click and lock between them.
He couldn't believe his own eyes for a moment, and he just stood there staring. And then he thought, This is crazy. This can't be happening to me. And then he hurried over to the door and he began to pound on it.
He stopped that almost immediately when he realized that he was in a hotel suite with people all around him and that it was very late, but he continued to lean against the door and talk rapidly and passionately into it. There was no answer, but he thought once or twice that he heard very soft sobbing, and he did everything in his power to make her understand that he was sorry. He told her that what he had tried to do was just something crazy which had popped suddenly into his mind, that he hadn't realized she would take it that way because all the books he'd read had said it was okay, and that he swore he would never try it again in his entire life, if she would only please forgive him and come back into the bedroom again. But there was just no answer at all.
And after he had pleaded with her for almost an hour, after he had talked himself hoarse and his throat felt like sandpaper, and had gotten no answer, he lay down wearily on the bed -- and a little later fell abruptly and unexpectedly asleep. And on the other side of the door, the brand-new Mrs. Kenny Norris nestled unhappily in a big easy chair and eventually fell asleep.
* * *
There are traitors in every crowd. The couple in Room 507 had been in bed together since eight o'clock that evening, but they gave no thought to sex at all. They lay on opposite edges of the big double-bed and they were both fast asleep.
Their names were Vic and Grace Zachary, and they had been married for nearly thirteen years. And for the past three of those thirteen years, the truth of the matter was that they had hardly had any sexual thoughts about each other at all, though they did perform the act together when their bodies called for it and it happened to be mutually convenient. At such times, however, their lovemaking was strictly mechanical and routine and uninspired, strictly a functional ritual rather than for fun, which was a pity because they were both attractive people and had once been very much attracted to one another.
They were still very attractive to members of the opposite sex who met them in business or socially, or simply passed them on the street; they still brought in more than an occasional interested glance. Vic Zachary was thirty-six now, a tall, wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted man whose deep-set grey eyes were of the type other women were fond of describing as "brooding" and whose close-cut dark hair was just beginning to show a few traces of grey at the temples, and Grace Zachary was thirty-three and rather tall, too, a slim girl with natural dark-red hair and a beautiful, full-breasted figure.
Their disinterest in each other had not yet reached the point where either of them had had an outside affair, though both had acquaintances who were more than willing and had extended some pretty plain invitation. Both of them, however, had had fairly frequent secret thought about it and realized that the time was probably close. In the meantime, they remained faithful, though increasingly detached, and most of the time when they went to bed together, like tonight, they turned away from each other and slept.
They owned a big furniture store in Chicago, working together in the store six days a week, and perhaps it was their constant togetherness which had made them a bit bored with each other. It was also probably the reason they remained together without risking the dangers of side-trips into adultery, because they were a wonderful business team and had built their store from a little hole in the wall to one of the largest and most prosperous furniture establishments in the midwest. They were in New York to attend a furniture show which was scheduled to open at the Coliseum the morning after next.
They'd arrived in the city at six o'clock that evening. They had driven in from Chicago rather than taking a train, which had been a mistake. Even in their big, roomy, air-conditioned Cadillac, and even though they'd alternated in taking turns at the wheel, the drive had been a grind and a strain, and they were both dead tired when Vic finally pulled the car up and handed it over to the Madison-Plaza doorman. They'd talked, during the last lap of their trip, about washing up and changing after they arrived and then having dinner and trying to get tickets to one of the shows, but they changed their minds as soon as they'd checked in: they had a quick room service dinner instead and went right to bed.
A number of years ago, particularly during the first three or four years of their marriage, they'd done a lot of travelling together on buying trips and the like, and their arrival in a hotel -- or motel-room had always been a signal for the creation of a kind of wicked excitement in both of them. The sight of the strange surroundings and the big bed beckoning at them had always made them feel lewd and wild and wanton, almost as though they weren't really married but had registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith and were just shacking up for the night, and they'd hardly been able to wait for the bellman to put down their bags and leave so they could get at each other. But not tonight, and not a great many other recent tonights.
Tonight they got into bed as though there were a mile-high wall between them, and they moved apart without even a good-night kiss and told each other sleepily that tomorrow was time enough for fun. And by fun, they meant only things innocent enough to have brought a smile of approval to the lemon-biting face of a Presbyterian clergyman of the old school: shows and shopping and probably some visits to the museums. Those things, plus perhaps a few laughs with Bill and Reggie Graham.
Bill and Regina Graham were another couple who also ran a big furniture store together, and they, too, were coming to New York for the show at the Coliseum. They were not from Chicago like the Zacharys -- they were from Des Moines -- but they'd met at last year's big furniture show in Miami, and it had been a great source of regret to all four of them that they'd met on the day before last of that show, because they'd hit it off immediately and had had a ball those last couple of days. There'd been considerable moaning and groaning when they'd had to separate at the end of the show, and they'd agreed then and there to make up for it the next time, by getting together right at the start of the next show.
The Grahams were driving in to New York, toe, and were scheduled to arrive at the Madison-Plaza late that night or early the next morning. And just before Grace fell asleep, her body lovely in her transparent green nightgown, but completely safe from the man next to her, asked her husband, "Did you remember to check the Grahams' reservations, dear?"
"Sure did," Vic said sleepily, and without opening his eyes. "I inquired while I was signing us in. They're booked just where we requested -- right next door in 308."
CHAPTER FOUR
The Grahams arrived at the Madison-Plaza at eleven-thirty-five, and it was typical of their innate thoughtfulness that, though they'd had a good night's sleep the night before and a good, leisurely dinner at a roadside restaurant three hours ago and had driven slowly and casually all day and were not tired at all, they gave no thought at all to routing out the Zacharys and having a big wild hello. They realized that the Zacharys might well be tired and fast asleep, so instead they checked in and cleaned up and went for a quiet walk along Park Avenue, and then they, too, went to bed.
And there, their pattern of similarity with the Zacharys first showed itself. They, too, were good-looking people and attractive to many a roving eye, and they, too, had once found it difficult to keep their hands off each other; but they, too, had left those days long behind. And when they went to bed, they, too, moved apart without embrace and slept.
Physically, they were not similar at all. They were just about the same ages as the Zacharys, thirty-six and thirty-three, and Bill Graham was almost as tall as Vic Zachary, but there the resemblance ended completely. Graham's hair was as light as Zachary's was dark, so pale-blond that his hair and his eyebrows looked almost bleached, and his eyes were blue rather than grey, and, unlike Zachary's broad-shouldered and athletic build, Graham was thin and faintly stoop-shouldered in an interesting, scholarly sort of way. And Reggie Graham was nothing at all like the tall red-haired, full-breasted Grace Zachary: she was dark-haired and vividly dark-eyed and very petite, just barely five feet in her high-heeled shoes, and her figure was slight and almost boyish.
But physical considerations aside, the resemblances between the two couples were uncanny. Both couples had started their businesses in the same month of the same year, and the Grahams, too, had started with a tiny little store and worked together night and day and built their business into a huge_ and profitable concern. And they, too, had, slowly and unnoticeably, drifted apart personally as they had moved together in a business way.
Neither couple had children, but with the Grahams, as with the Zacharys, it had not been for lack of love or connection in the early years of their marriage. They had made love to each other nearly every night in those first few years, and sometimes more often than once a night, and they had continued to play and experiment with each other long after most other couples had fallen into a set pattern of marital love.
They had sometimes taken each other with Bill on top in the usual manner and they had sometimes taken each other with Reggie on top and grinning down wickedly at her husband. They had taken each other with Reggie naked and backed against a wall and Bill prodding violently against and with her, and sitting in a big easy chair with Reggie on Bill's lap and facing him and her hot mouth pressed against his, and in canine fashion with Reggie stooped over and her small buttocks thrust upward. They had taken each other in the small apartment they had rented at first, and in the big home they'd bought after a while, and in the public parks of Des Moines after dark, and sometimes, like a couple of delinquent kids, in their car when the mood had seized them on the way home from parties or from the movies. And they were wild about each other.
But children never came to hold them together, and the years began to pass and continued to pass, and the violent lovemaking became less and less frequent. Then, slowly, the abandoned experimentation quieted down and finally ceased entirely, and the joining of their bodies became, as with the Zacharys, nothing more than an occasional and widely-spaced manifestation of physical need. And for the past year or so, they had hardly had even that.
The Grahams had not been as totally faithful as the Zacharys. Each had had a brief affair in the past year, but these had not amounted to anything. Bill had gone alone to Grand Rapids on a business trip and, to his own surprise, had asked a secretary at the firm he'd visited for a date and had been accepted and had taken the girl to dinner and then to his hotel room, where they'd spent the night in constant and completely enjoyable lovemaking. And Reggie, during one of her rare days away from the store, had been flirted at by a brash young door-to-door salesman and, on a sudden crazy impulse, had flirted back at him and had ended up taking him into the bed she previously shared only with Bill. She had had a completely wonderful time that day: doing things that she had never done before even with Bill, like making love to the boy's middle body with her mouth and she'd felt that her passionate abandonment had been a return to the earliest days of her marriage.
But both Bill and Reggie had been desperately careful to conceal their single departure from the straight and narrow from each other, even though each was all too aware of the chasm between them and suspected that the other might not even care; and neither repeated the experience. They returned to their pattern of lovemaking on those rare occasions when physical necessity made interest unessential.
And on their first night in New York, a city, they'd visited only twice before and mutually agreed was the most exciting in the world, they took an old-peoples' walk along Park Avenue and then returned to the Madison-Plaza and went to sleep with their backs toward each other.
* * *
The girl in Room 309 slept, too, but she slept alone, and she was glad of it. It was a relatively new experience for her. Like Grace Zachary and Reggie Graham, she had had a husband alongside her each night, but she had recently spent the necessary amount of weeks in Las Vegas and she had shed him. And now, she was in New York to have herself a wild whirl around the town and try to forget, as she described it with a delicate little yawn, her "broken marriage."
The pattern was not a new one to her: she had been in Nevada before for the same purpose and had followed up with a trip to New York for the same purpose. Her name was Connie Franklin, and she was twenty-six years ago. She had been married five times.
The last marriage had been the longest one of all; it had lasted twenty months and three days. The reason it had lasted as long as that, Connie confided to the other almost-divorcees she met at the crap tables at the Sands and the Sahara and the Flamingo and all the other places, was that her number five, Phil Franklin, had been the dearest and sweetest and most considerate one of them all. It had been almost painful to have to toss him aside.
That was the curious thing about all of her marriage, she told anyone who would listen to her: all of her husbands had been perfect gentlemen from start to finish. To hear the other women around Vegas tell it, every other husband in the world was a completely selfish individual and a beast and a sadist and a philanderer, but that had not been her experience at all. Every one of her husbands had been absolutely wonderful to her; there had not been a single harsh word exchanged between them, even when she told them she was leaving them and seeking a divorce. They had been stunned and hurt, she said with absolute truth, but never nasty.
Connie had been married for the first time when she was seventeen: she had been a chorus girl then in a little night club in her home town, New Orleans, and this absolutely gorgeous boy had walked in and swept her off her feet and married her a week later. The boy had turned out to be so rich that it would have taken him a lifetime to count all his money, one of three sons of a Texas family which had made multi-trillions in oil properties and oil machinery. The family had never really approved of her, but the boy had been absolutely wonderful.
He had leaped to fulfill her every little desire, and he had given her everything she wanted, including some things she never even got around to wearing or using, so much jewelry and clothing that she lost track of the things she owned. He followed her around like a prize lap-dog, ready to leap to her command, and his devotion never faltered from the first day of their marriage to the last.
That marriage lasted fourteen months, and, Connie told her listeners, the boy actually sat down and cried when she told him that she was going to divorce him Some of her listeners smiled cynically when she said that, but she was telling the absolute truth.
She returned to her chorus job after that, more to keep busy than anything else, because a marriage settlement had left her absolutely independently wealthy, and she did not venture into marriage again until two years later. Her second marriage did not take her too far afield from the first: she married her first husband's older brother. He was, Connie said, very considerably older. Her first husband had been only twenty, but husband number two was nearly twenty-three.
Sadly enough, however, the second marriage was not at all the success the first had been. Husband number two was a sweet boy, too, fawning all over her and always buying her gifts, managing to find some things that had not occurred to his brother -- but the marriage lasted only six months instead of fourteen.
In telling her story at the various casinos around Vegas, Connie nearly always caused at this point and took a long pull at the Chivas-on-the-rocks which a bar-girl had brought her; she nearly always, in fact, had a Chivas-on-the-rocks in her hand and frequently paused to get rid of it so the bargirl could bring her another one. And during those pauses, the women in her audience sometimes showed disbelief, but the men believed her completely -- the parts about her husbands drooling all over her, anyway.
Because, whether the women in the casinos admitted it or not, no one else in any of the places came even close to her; she was just completely and breathtakingly beautiful. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and a lovely movie-star's face; thick-lashed blue eyes, a straight nose, faintly uptilted at the very tip, a provocatively petulant mouth, and cream-clear skin. And her body could have given Marilyn and Jayne and Brigitte lessons.
She was very slim and flat-bellied, but her breasts and her buttocks were, like, crazy, man. The dresses she wore weren't exactly loose-fitting, all-concealing potato sacks, and her buttocks poured forth in flamboyant, perfect twin arcs against the tight cloth. Her breasts, barely held under control by her low-cut dress and her inch-wide lace brassiere, were huge but beautifully shaped, and curving upward in a firm, high-pointed way and threatening to pour out into the open. They never did, quite, but the promise was still delightful because more than half of the soft white mounds showed out of the dress at all times.
There was generally rapt attention, grudging on the part of the women, mixed with open desire on the men, when Connie finished her drink, and then she told the listeners about her other husbands. They had been, more or less, counterparts of the first two, better-than-aver-age handsome and always rich, and they had been kind to her and devoted to her and gentle and loving to her.
And she had divorced the next two in less than a year apiece, and her latest, the champion laster of them, in less than a couple of years.
The inevitable question followed her story, of course. If her husbands had all been rather good-looking and unquestionably rich, and if they'd all been kind and devoted to her, and if they'd never quarreled and had apparently been completely compatible, why on earth had she been compelled to divorce them one after the other?
Connie always answered the question, and when she did, the slightly vacant smile left her beautiful face for the first time, and her sulky, passionate mouth tightened and became savage. And for the first time, and only for an instant, so fast that a casual watcher could easily miss it, she showed ravaging bitterness.
"Because," she said in her soft Southern voice, "the loving louses bored me to death. They just absolutely bored me to death."
She would never amplify it beyond that, but that was the key to it all: each of her five rich, handsome husbands had bored her completely. They had bored her with their fawning devotion, and with their humble loving-kindness, and with the abject way they constantly tossed themselves at her feet. And most important of all, because they had carried over their gentleness and don't-touch-too-hard-or you'll break attitude into their lovemaking, they had bored her, God how they had bored her, in bed.
She had tried with each of them, with all five of them. She had turned toward them willingly the moment she felt their hands on her as they lay together in bed, their hands sliding over her buttocks or breasts or beginning to lift the sexy nightgown she always wore, and she had always cooperated completely and with a convincing display of uncontrolled passion. She had always given them exactly what they wanted, joining in with her middle and her buttocks and her mouth and tongue and fulfilling whatever ordinary or special desire they displayed on any particular night. And she had apparently been absolutely great at it, because they had always been obviously satisfied and saturated afterward and they had all been bitterly unhappy when she had left them.
But as for her, it had been absolutely nothing. She had been a virgin when she'd married the first time, and she had not been feigning her trembling excitement when she and her husband had stripped naked and gotten into bed together on their wedding night, but his technique had been so tentative and gentle and refined that she had cooled off half way through it and completed the embrace in utter boredom. And that had been the keynote of all the embraces in all her marriages after that: such complete gentleness and humility and delicacy, even during some of the more exotic positions, that she had sometimes found herself yearning -- just for a change -- for a little ugly brutality, something that would cause one of her husbands to grow furious with her and send his fist crashing into her lovely face.
Nothing of that sort ever happened, however, or even came close to happening. There was just cloying kindness piled on cloying kindness, straight to the point each time where she couldn't stand any more of the gentle boredom and had to tell the then-current husband that she'd had it and was going to Las Vegas or Reno or Mexico City, and getting herself a divorce.
There was never any bitterness when she came out with that announcement on each of the five occasions. There was deep and genuine sorrow and disappointment, of course, at least on the part of the husbands, but never a harsh word toward her: each of her husbands had convinced himself so completely that her happiness was more important than his own that he finally agreed not to contest the divorce, despite the fact that Connie could give no understandable reason for wanting it. It ended up as being simply sufficient that it was obviously what Connie wanted and needed for happiness.
And because there was no bitterness at the time of the separations which eventually became the divorce, there was no bitterness, either, after the divorces, and she frequently went out on dates with her ex-husbands when any of them happened to turn up in a town at the same time she happened to be there. Her failures at marriage did not disillusion her toward men: she still liked men and male company and spent most of her spare time between marriages with men, either with her ex-husbands if they were around or with her next-husbands, or with any of the scores of others who were attracted by her spectacular beauty and asked to take her out. The only thing about which she was disillusioned was bedplay. She had found it a drag and a bore the hundreds of times she'd undergone it in her various marriages, and so she avoided it utterly between marriages; she went through with it during her marriages strictly because she was a fair-minded girl and realized it was part of the deal.
She didn't blame her five ex-husbands for the fact that sex was such an overall yawn as far as she was concerned; not at all. On the contrary, she'd thought it out completely during the early days of her very first marriage, when she had first begun to realize that she'd have no trouble at all falling asleep right in the middle of one of those delicate bouts of romance, and she'd reached a firm conclusion which she still considered correct: the fact that it was almost entirely her fault. She was, apparently, a frigid woman, a woman who was simply incapable of being stirred by the act, and that was that. There seemed to be no question about it. One husband might have been a faulty technician, but five failures in a row unquestionably pinned the guilt squarely on a deficiency in her.
So it was strictly no dice when one of her ex-husbands took her cut on a date and suggested a stop-off or a conclusion in the sack for auld lang syne, or when one of the men who never became a husband took her out and spent the entire evening trying to convince her that he could bring about reactions in her that all her ex-husbands had been unable to achieve. She said 'No' and meant it, saved her resigned excursions into the boudoir for her marriages, and accepted each new failure and divorce with increasing casualness.
And she fell into the habit of embarking on her recovery-vacation in New York with genuine happiness. It just felt so damn good to be sleeping alone.
* * *
The man who lived in the last room on the third floor, Room 310, looked like an innocent. He had a lean, lanky, country-boy look about him, vaguely resembling the movie actor Jimmy Stewart in his earlier days and earlier roles, except that his straight black hair was growing very thin and he wore horn-rimmed glasses. He looked as if he might be an insurance salesman who spend his Sundays scoutmastering a troop on hikes in Palisades Park, or a junior high school English teacher who spent his Sundays conducting a bible class at the YMCA, or possibly even a bank-teller in a minor bank who spent his Sundays attending Uplifting Lectures.
He wasn't any of those things, and he certainly wasn't an innocent. He was a man who was wanted on serious criminal charges in no less than seventeen different states, and he spent his Sundays either committing his latest act of violence or planning his next one.
His criminal acts were not those involving theft or burglary or stick-ups or anything of that sort. For one thing, these were completely unnecessary as far as he was concerned because he had inherited enough money on the deaths of his mother and father to cover his relatively modest needs for the rest of his life; and for another, he considered theft and robbery acts of barbarism and would have been shocked and revolted at the notion of performing these himself. His crimes took a different form entirely: he liked to seize and rape women who walked alone and unprotected down dark and deserted streets.
His name was Joe York, and he was a quiet, soft-spoken, well-bred, well-read, literature and likeable man ex pt for what he termed in his own mind "his one idiosyncrasy."
He was thirty-one years old now, and he had committed his first rape almost by accident twelve years before. He had been a junior then at a very-well-known college in Massachusetts, and he'd been undergoing a serious personal disturbance at the time because he'd discovered that he got no pleasure at all out of his visits to the various bordellos surrounding the college. And this was obviously abnormal because all the friends who went along with him most of these times enjoyed it so much they could hardly wait to scrape a little more money together and come again -- in several senses of that last phrase.
The night on which the rape occurred, he had gone alone to one of these places, a joint run by a fat woman named Susie Parsons, and the reason he went alone was that he wanted to see if the company he'd had on previous visits had had anything to do with his complete lack of enjoyment. He had visited joints on perhaps ten occasions before that, always finding the experience unpleasant rather than joyous, always hurrying to get it over with rather than struggling to hold back and prolong it as was the case with his buddies; and it had occurred to him that perhaps he'd been shy and embarrassed because his friends were around, and he could really let himself go if he went alone. He confided his problem to Mrs. Parsons, and she assigned one of her best girls and the girl did a thorough and conscientious job -- but it was no good. He managed to finish, but he did so entirely without pleasure, and he left the place in deepest gloom and despair because it seemed obvious to him now that there was something seriously wrong with him.
He had been walking the streets for perhaps two hours, brooding over his troubles, when he suddenly realized that he'd wandered into one of the more desolate streets of the town, and that there was a girl of about his own age walking quickly and nervously down the block ahead of him.
At first the girl meant nothing at all to him; this one was a stranger who would probably run and scream if he approached her, and he'd just had a girl who'd obliged him in his most intimate wishes and had accomplished absolutely nothing. But then, without even knowing exactly why, he began to walk a little faster and got a little closer to the girl, and suddenly he felt his heartbeat quicken and a curious, violent excitement begin to run through his body.
The girl was very pretty, he realized when he was just a dozen feet or so behind her: he could tell that even though he could only see her back and catch quick little looks at her profile. Her hair was dark-red, almost wine-colored, and worn in a braid which wound completely around her head, and she had a small, upturned Irish nose and green eyes, wide and frightened-looking now, and a good, full-lipped mouth. And her body looked interesting, too; he couldn't see her breasts, though he was sure they were well-developed to fit the rest of her, but her waist small and her buttocks curved out and wide and they jiggled a little as she half-ran ahead of him down the street.
But that wasn't it all; it wasn't her beauty that was creating this sudden, violent, eye-bulging excitement in him. The girl he'd had at the Parsons joint had been no so-so bimbo either; she'd been a real beauty, too, picked especially for the occasion after he'd told the fat madame his troubles, and so had some of the other girls he'd had in other joints. No, it wasn't that: it was something else entirely.
It was, he realized suddenly as he quickened his steps and got closer and closer to the red-haired girl, even though she was just about running unashamedly now, the fact that she was so frightened -- and so vulnerable. That was it. Her genuine fear, there on the dark and deserted and shadowy street, was so strong that he could feel it clearly, almost taste it. She was afraid of him, afraid of the way he was tracking her and approaching her like some stalking animal. And suddenly, so close to her now that he could almost touch her, he felt like an animal -- wild and alien and deadly -- and full of joy -- He threw his arm suddenly around the girl's neck in a mugger's grip, his fingers covering her mouth and shutting off the scream which had begun to burst forth from her slim throat. She began to fight him, biting at his fingers and clawing at his face with her fingernails, and he reached up his free hand and hit her, very hard, in the eye. He felt her body sag in his grasp, and he hit her once more to make sure, and then he dragged her into a nearby alley.
There was a big pile of old rags in the alley, and he threw her limp body down on it and bent down and looked at the girl. There was a faint trace of spittle on the right corner of his mouth and he was making low, strange animal noises deep in his throat, and he was abruptly aware of astonishment at himself: not at what he was doing, which oddly didn't surprise him at all, but at the sudden depth of his hunger for the girl. Up close, she really wasn't as beautiful as all that -- her eyes were a little close together, and her face was a bit fatter and wider than it had appeared in profile, and tier breasts looked disappointingly small under her fuzzy white sweater -- but she seemed to him like the woman he had wanted to take and brutalize and ravage all his life.
He reached down then and began to tear her sweater away from her, and he saw her eyelids flutter as she began to regain consciousness. He waited until her long lashes had swept completely upward and she'd seen him and realized what was happening and had opened her mouth to scream again, and then he hit her once more, and he felt the excitement deepen within him as he saw a trickle of blood run down her chin. After that she did not try to stop him again.
He returned to her sweater again and tore it sharply away from her body, and he knew, when he saw the well-filled brassiere underneath, that her breasts would not be as disappointing as he'd supposed. It was just that her brassiere was a very tight one; very confining and binding, but underneath her flesh was full and well-developed. His hands were trembling so much now that he had to tense his fingers to steady them enough to open the catch of her brassiere. But he managed it, and he pulled it away from her body and threw it into the dark shadows surrounding them.
He'd been right the second time: her breasts were not really small at all. Out of confinement, they were really rather large, and very well-shaped, protruding in high-curved loveliness toward the hazy spring sky. He looked at them hungrily for a moment, and then he ran his fingers and the palms of his hands over them, his fingers tingling with the sensation in a way which had just never happened at any of the joints.
Then, after a while, he reached down and caught at the girl's skirt, and he tore it away from her, ripping it from her body in shreds. He tossed the shreds away almost disdainfully, and then he returned to the slim body on the pile of rags, his fingers ripping at her half-sup and silk pants. He shredded these quickly, too, and threw them away, and then he bent again close to her body, naked except for her stockings and French-heeled shoes.
She was not unconscious now; she was lying still entirely out of fear of him and of what he would do to her if she tried to scream or tried to fight him again. But her green eyes were wide open and staring up at him, and he grinned down at her and said softly, "Put your legs around and lift them into the air." And when she did not obey him immediately, he balled his right hand into a fist and moved it slowly down toward her face, and her legs moved at once and lifted high and beckoningly into the air.
He looked down at her again for a moment, enjoying the vulnerability of her, enjoying the trembling of her slim body and the fullness of her red-nippled breasts and the delicate feminity of her. It seemed to him, in the black silence of the alley, that he and this girl were the only two human beings in the world, and the thought, a twisted and Black Mass version of the Adam and Eve stories he had been told in Sunday School as a child, excited him even further. And suddenly, his fingers trembling even more now, he opened his clothes and lunged down violently and joined her.
He felt her body tense at the sensation as his body plunged to her, but there was no inner resistance to him; this one was no more a virgin, despite her show of outraged innocence in fighting him, than the girl he had left at Susie Parsons' a couple of hours before. He thought to himself, What the hell does one more mean, tramp?, and he said in her ear, "Make it good, redhead. Make it good, or I swear to you, I'll kill you!"
He meant it, and she knew he meant it, and her legs tightened and her arms tightened around his back, and she began to sway her body. He put one arm around her back and his other hand on her breast, squeezing and clutching it brutally and bruisingly, and then he put his mouth hard against hers. She did not respond at once, but then he began to move his buttocks more and more sharply, entering deeply and almost withdrawing and then entering deeply again and again, and he heard a gasp which was not one of fear and her mouth opened and her tongue emerged to join his.
Their tongues twisting and turning together inside his mouth, he continued to plunge back and forth against her. His hand on her breast squeezed her harder and harder, digging into her flesh and pulling at her long, distended nipple, and his hand on her back slid down and held her buttocks and crushed her more tightly against him. And then her arms and legs tightened around him without any urging on his part.
The girl had begun to moan with pleasure constantly now, inward sounds because their mouths were glued together, and their bodies ground against each other in an agony of enjoyment. And after a while, very suddenly, they both began to tighten and tense.
They completed together: he could feel the spasms of her body just as he felt his own. And it seemed to him, then, that a blinding and wonderful light had burst forth in the darkness, because, for the first time in his life, he had experienced real enjoyment in an act of love with a woman, and greater enjoyment than he had ever imagined possible in the human body. And it was as though a great weight had lifted away from him.
He said nothing of this to the girl, of course; he simply stood up in silence and arranged his clothing, and then he was gone into the darkness as abruptly as he had come out of it. But when the girl got to her feet, too, and stood blinking into the darkness, bruised and bewildered and frightened again and clutching at rags to cover her nakedness, she could hear him whistling, a shrill, happy sound far in the distance.
She did not, naturally, know the reason for his happiness; she simply assumed it was pleasure at what he had just done to and with her, but of course it was a lot more than that. For it seemed to Joe York now that all of his trouble were over, for he knew now that he was not, and he had begun to suspect with real horror, some kind of fairy; he knew now that he could enjoy a woman as much as any other man, and perhaps more than most. All he needed was a little violence mixed in with it, and that, oddly, bothered him not at all.
The newspapers made a great deal of noise the following day; a policeman found the girl, in a daze and still in the alley, about an hour after Joe left her there, and the more sensational newspapers in the town were beginning to hammer out front-page stories about the occurrence an hour after that. The girl, naturally, said nothing about the way she had joined in with Joe after a while, and she had the bruises and welts on her face to show that she had been forced.
Joe York read the stories with pleasure and even pride. There was just one thing in them which surprised and worried him a little. The girl was not, as he'd supposed, an unmarried non-virgin, despite the fact that he'd seen that she wore no rings on her third finger left hand. She had been out on the street because she'd been on the way home from a bridge party alone when her Mercedes-Benz had broken down, and she'd decided to try to find a gas station or a phone. She had taken off her rings and had slipped them down inside her car seat because she was afraid of robbery. She turned out to be the wife of the prominent son of one of the most prominent families in the state, and married just three weeks -- and the family was obviously capable of putting tremendous extra pressure on the police to get the rapist at once.
He worried about it a while, and then he said to himself, cynically, They'll never think of me. And that guy should never have let his wife go out alone after three weeks of marriage, so the hell with them both. He did not give the matter another thought, and he was right in feeling as calm as he did. The police picked up scores of known degenerates and more scores of men with sex-crime records, but, though the girl's description of him had been remarkably accurate, no one ever came near him from the police department, and after a while the case died down and was forgotten by everyone but the girl and her family.
That was the beginning of a new pattern of life for Joe York, He attacked girls several times more while he was in college, and then much more frequently after that. After he had graduated, he was able to roam around the country with complete freedom, never remaining in any one city long enough to commit so many rapes that he started a real scare and got himself caught. His parent's had both died and left him a rather substantial amount of money, so he became a gentleman collector of rare books and visited dealers around the country as a cover-up for the real reason for his travels.
He was always cautious about it, sufficiently cautious so that not even his close friends suspected there was anything odd about him except for the fact that he did not work at a job -- and they simply envied that, and said they'd have done the same if they'd had his kind of money. Even while still in college, he continued to visit the various joints with his friends, and after his graduation, whenever he was in his home town of Providence, he went out on double dates with his friends and made passes and even had several successful affairs with girls he knew. But this was strictly smokescreen and he never enjoyed any of it; was only when he went creeping after a frightened girl on a dark street and pulled her into the shadows and beat and forced her, that he felt wild enjoyment in sex.
'His forced conquests grew in number through the years, and a few times he had to beat up girls pretty severely to get them to behave. One girl had gone into a mental hospital for a while after he had seized her, and was still undergoing out-patient treatment's; another had been cut up so badly all over her face by his fists that she required plastic surgery afterward, and the plastic surgery was not completely successful. But Joe felt no pangs of conscience at all: he had not asked for this condition of his, and he owed it to himself to do what he had to do since he did have it; and anyway, a girl who walked around alone at a late hour in a deserted neighborhood was asking for and deserved whatever she got. And he continued and increased his sudden attacks all around the country.
In time, he got himself on the Wanted lists in seventeen cities; though never, of course, as Joe York, but merely as a man whose physical description happened to fit him, and also fit hundred of other men. He was never even suspected: the police were looking for a mentally-deranged criminal, not a young man of wealth and good family and excellent education who happened to be in town on book-buying business. The closest he ever came to trouble was when he was picked up by a sharp-eyed young rookie on a street a few blocks from the spot in which he had beaten and attacked a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three in Roanoke, but the woman was in a state of shock and said she didn't think he was the man. He was held in jail overnight, but was released with red-faced apologies when he was checked and found to be the responsible, well-connected man he said he was.
He was in New York now because this was one city he had never happened to hit before, and it seemed to him that, with its five boroughs filled with hundreds of dark and lonely streets, it represented fresh and plentiful pickings. He was fast asleep on the night of June 20th because he had just flown in from his last stop, San Francisco. It had been a rough flight and he was tired. But he had complete, exciting plans for the next night.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ann Wentworth awoke the next morning feeling completely shattered at her experience of the night before, horrified with herself at the way she'd become so devastatingly filled with heat at the sight of a member of her own sex -- her own sex -- undressing at the window across the way. It spelled out all too clearly that she was, without question, what she'd always feared at the back of her mind she might be, and she brooded about it as she showered and dressed and as she had a quick breakfast of orange juice and coffee and toast.
She continued to think about it, feeling gripped with despair, when she arrived at the advertising agency at which she worked. Her unhappiness lay so heavily on her mind that it interfered with her work all through the day. Several times in the morning, and then several times more in the afternoon, while she was taking dictation from her boss, her thoughts wandered away from her notes to her memory of the beautiful and naked girl at the window, and she lost track and had to ask her boss to repeat the last few sentences. She apologized for her inattention, saying she wasn't feeling very well. But she knew her boss was eyeing her narrowly because this wasn't like her at all; and toward the end of the day, after she'd blown up in the middle of dictation for the fifth time and had finally gotten the letters straight and was going to her own desk to type up the notes, she could still feel his curious, puzzled eyes boring into her slim back.
Somehow, she managed to get through the day, but it just wasn't any good. Even when she was away from her boss and back at the comparative privacy of her own desk, she couldn't concentrate: she couldn't even read her notes and type up the few letters she'd taken down. All she could seem to think about was the night before, the way that girl had looked and the way she'd reacted to her. And at a quarter of five, she simply gave up the struggle and the attempt to go about her work in ordinary fashion, and she just sat there waiting for the final fifteen minutes to roll past, just sat there waiting and thinking.
All right, she told herself bleakly, let's try and face it and think a little bit into the future. Supposing I am one of those girls who goes only for other girls. What does it mean as far as the rest of my life is concerned? Am I ever going to get up the nerve to try and have an affair with another woman -- and if I do, will I enjoy it, or will it just be nothing, the way it was with boys? Perhaps that's the sad story as far as my life is concerned; perhaps I can get excited just looking, but I'll freeze up if I try to do... abnormal things with another woman. And then her dark-blue eyes widened as another thought struck her. Or perhaps, she thought suddenly. I'm all wrong about this whole thing -- perhaps I've just talked myself into thinking I'm that way because I've never met a man who really interested me; perhaps I practically hypnotized myself getting all hot end bothered over that girl.
I just don't know, she thought miserably. I just don't know. She was startled suddenly by a sound of a gong -- the bell announcing that it was quitting time, and she stood up slowly and began mechanically to get her things together and prepare to leave. And then her lips tightened, and she thought with grim determination: Well, there's one thing that's certain, anyway. I've got to find out.
She had one fairly close friend at the agency, a dark-haired, pretty girl named Pat Hale who was executive secretary to one of the other V.P.'s. Pat would be able to help her; Pat was a native New Yorker, not a relatively recent newcomer like Ann, and she knew her way around the town. Her determination strengthening, she walked into Pat's office and said, "You leaving, Pat? I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes."
Pat was seated in front of her typewriter, her fingers racing across the keys, and she paused and nodded "In just a sec," she said. "I just want to finish this letter. I'm down to the last couple of lines."
Ann sank into the visitor's chair alongside Pat's desk, her heart already beginning to beat very fast as she rehearsed what she was going to say. And she thought, I can't say too much. She's a hip girl -- and I think I'll die if she figures it out. And as she sat there waiting, she tried to calm herself down, assuring herself that Pat would never get thoughts like that in a million years, and finally she succeeded in convincing herself that that was so.
Then Pat was finished and pulled the letter out of her IBM and covered the machine, Pat was a tallish, efficient, good-looking girl with soft-looking, shiny dark hair and very bright brown eyes. And as she started to clean up her desk, Ann watched her slim, efficient figure with a kind of envy, thinking, Why couldn't I have been born like her -- always on the ball, always in the know, always in control of herself, completely normal? She probably had a couple of dozen boy friends and slept with some of them and enjoyed it tremendously, and one day she'd marry one of the boys and then just sleep with him and enjoy that tremendously, too -- and live out the rest of her wonderful normal life.
By the time Pat had cleaned up her desk and picked up her handbag, Ann had worked up a story which seemed to her to have a logical and believable sound to it. And as they walked to the elevator and Pat asked, "What's on your mind, hon?", she was all ready.
"Nothing very serious," she said lightly. "Just something kind of crazy." And then she paused for a moment, and she continued with her words coming forth in a rush despite herself, "I was wondering if you could tell me the name of a place where those -- you know -- where queer women hang out?"
Pat stopped short and turned and stared at her, a curious, puzzled half-smile on her face. She said unbelievingly, "What was that?"
Ann's throat was suddenly and completely dry, but she went on, "I knew you'd laugh at me if T asked. But I've got a good reason, honestly... "
"I'm not laughing at you," Pat said. "What's the reason?"
Ann forced a smile. "It's a crazy reason, too," she said, "but it's important to me. You know that little town I come from -- Harley, Wisconsin, population nothing minu6 two? Well, I'm the only girl who's ever escaped from there and come to New York, and that makes me a kind of celebrity; I keep getting letters from my old girl friends and other girls asking me to give them the inside story on this wicked town. You know: the seamy stuff that never gets into the magazines they read back home."
"I see," Pat said slowly.
"Mostly," Ann said, "they keep asking about the Greenwich Village places -- the joints where the oddballs hang out. And that's pretty hard to answer for a girl who's never been anywhere more exotic than the Guggenheim Museum." She tried out the smile again, and this time it came through a bit more smoothly. "Ill make a confession to you, Pat," she went on. "I haven't had the courage to admit to them that I'm just as innocent about the Inside Stuff as they are -- so I've been making it up, all kinds of wild and hair-raising stories. And now my conscience is beginning to bother me . . She took a deep breath, and then she said, "So, I thought I'd like to see one of these places for myself, really honest to God see one."
They stood out in the corridor now, letting the elevators pass them by, and Pat had turned so that she looked squarely into Ann's flushed face, the aware look, which Ann knew and feared, clearly visible. And then she said, very softly, "I think you ought to go on making up your stories, Ann."
Ann felt sudden desperation; she was suddenly deeply afraid that she had gone this far, worked up her courage to ask the question, and now Pat wouldn't tell her. She cried out, "But why, Pat? I want to see one of those places for myself -- there's nothing wrong in that, is there?" She forced the smile again. "You're not thinking I'd be in danger or anything like that, are you?" she asked. "That's just silly. Those places are public places, aren't they? -- there'll be all kinds of people around. And anyway, nobody'll ever bother me. I'm too obviously like Mary Martin in that song: normal as blueberry pie."
Pat didn't answer for a moment. And then she said abruptly, a strange, harsh note in her voice. "Why ask me for information like that?"
Now it was Ann's turn to stare. "Why?" she echoed. "Because -- because you're my friend, and because you're a sophisticated girl and you've been around and you know this town."
"I see," Pat said again, and then she was silent once more. Then she shrugged and she said softly. "Yes, I've been around, all right. And I guess there really isn't any harm in your visiting one of the dyke joints. The best one in town is Drop Inn over on MacDougal."
"Dyke joints?" Ann said.
"You really are naive," Pat said. "Dykes are what girls who go for other girls call themselves. I don't remember the address on MacDougal, for Drop Inn I mean, but you can look it up in the phone book. It's just a little bar with a juke box for dancing, but the place is loaded with dykes dancing with each other and sitting at tables with their arms around each other."
Ann had a sudden vivid picture of the scene, and superimposed over the picture, in some strange way, was her memory of that beautiful naked girl across the way from her room; and she felt sudden heat and excitement stir within her. But she kept her voice light, and she said, "You're scaring me with that description of the place. Maybe you're right. Maybe I ought to stick to my imagination when I answer my pen pals."
Pat's eyes continued to search her, very bright and sharp now, but if she had private notions about Ann's real reasons for her request she did not voice them. She said in her soft voice,, "That's what I recommend, kid."
"Well," Ann said, "I'll give it thought. I don't intend to go racing down to that sin-den right away, anyway."
One of the elevators opened at their floor again, and this time they took it. They walked together to the corner and then they separated, Pat to take the subway to her apartment in Brooklyn Heights and Ann to walk to her room at the Madison-Plaza.
But Ann did not go to the Madison-Plaza at all. She had dinner at a little restaurant on East 49th, eating slowly and letting time pass until the watch on her wrist showed that it was appropriately late, and then she left the restaurant and took a cab to Greenwich Village and the bar on MacDougal.
* * *
The red-haired boy who lived in Room 302 at the hotel, Tim Halloran, spent an equally restless and unhappy day. He had had no stirring experience the previous night like Ann Wentworth, because he'd been to stag films before and had ended up alone in the same way before, but in his case it was a matter of enough being enough. He'd had it, he told himself over and over as he went through his work-day of giving out refrigerator parts and supplies to people who came up to his windows; and when that night arrived, he was, somehow, some way, going to find the means of ending his gnawing, unsatisfied desperate hunger once and for all.
He could hardly wait for the day to come to an end; but when it did he forced himself, like Ann, to waste additional hours having a slow dinner at a chain restaurant. The object of his search, too, wouldn't turn up, in all likelihood, until nine o'clock or so, so there was no point in going after it any earlier.
While he ate, lingering over his bowl of soup and hot roast beef sandwich and coffee and danish. he thought about approaching another cabbie, and then he rejected the idea. That one sanctimonious bastard had been more than enough, so the hell with it; it would be just his kind of luck to draw another guy who'd give him a sermon instead of an address. And anyway, he had a much better, much more likely possibility in mind.
The place he had in mind was a bar on West 45th Street, a crummy little joint called the Rivoli. He'd passed the bar one day with an older man who worked where he did, and he'd stopped and looked at the window because there was a big sign there stating that the establishment was a "Raided Premises."
He hadn't known what that meant, and he'd asked the man with him, who grinned at him in a superior way. "I guess that's a sort of New York institution," his friend said. "They probably do it different in Croydon, Pennsylvania. It means that the joint was crawling with broads -- hookers, and it's against the law for bars to permit hookers to hang around waiting for customers, so the cops rolled up one day and arrested the broads and stuck the 'Raided Premises' sign in the window to notify the public". He added cynically, "The owner of the joint must have forgotten to pay off the precinct captain one week or something."
Tim remained to the spot, staring and reading the legal language underneath the "Raided Premises" headline. "But I don't get it," he said, finally. "You mean they padlocked the place because it was patronized by -- by prostitutes ? But it isn't padlocked, Sammy. I can see people inside at the bar right now."
"That's the crazy thing about the bit," the other man said, grinning. "They don't close up the place at all when something like that happens. They just haul in the girl's and fine the proprietor and stick that sign in the window for a few weeks. And it all works out to be a first-rate ad for the bar. The bims pay their fine and head right back, and the bar doubles its business because every horny guy in town reads the sign and crowds into the joint."
Tim looked in at the bar again. "I don't see any women in there now," he said.
"That's because the place was probably just raided in the last few days," the other man said patiently. "I don't mean that the hookers show up again in the next week or anything like that. The cops keep an eye on the place for a while, particularly during the period when the sign is still in the window. But after a while, say a couple of months, the sign goes down and the dames come back and it's just like before, only more so."
Tim thought about this as he finished his coffee, and then, though it was still not quite eight o'clock and much too early, he paid his bill and walked quickly and eagerly over to West 45th. Because it had been a full four months since he'd passed the Rivoli, and that sign had been down for quite a long time.
He entered the place almost stealthily, looking around him as he walked to the bar. It was a complete and absolute dump, dirty and unpainted and beat up, and he felt sharp disappointment when he saw that there were no women at all in the place, just the bartender and a quiet drunk knocking it down by himself at an end stool. But this, he told himself, must be because it was still so early, and he sat down right in front of the bartender and ordered a beer.
The beer came quickly, flat and weak, but he began to drink it as though he was enjoying it, nursing it and trying to work up the nerve to put the question to the bartender. The matter was brought to a head when he had finished the beer and the bartender stood suddenly leaning toward him and asking if he wanted anything else.
"Yeah," Tim said, making his voice deep and tough and trying to keep it from trembling. "Two things, in fact. Another beer -- and a favor."
The bartender was an ugly little man, short and squat and swarthy, with a flat, fist-scarred face. He did not move to get the beer and he did not ask what the favor was; he just stood there, waiting. And after a moment, Tim answered his unspoken questions. "I'd like to get myself a broad," Tim said. The bartender's flat face twisted into a scowl and he chopped a hand down flatly in a gesture of disgust, and he turned and drew the beer and slid it across the bar to Tim. He said tonelessly, "This ain't no matrimonial bureau, baby."
"I don't want to marry the dame," Tim said. "I just want to get into the sack with her." The bartender did not answer; he just continued to scowl and stare, beady-eyed, at Tim. And suddenly Tim's forced calm broke into little pieces, and he dropped all pretense of toughness and casualness, and he said desperately, his voice high and strained, "Help me out, will you, mister?
I really need it bad."
The bartender continued to stare at Tim for a long time, studying his anxious, blood-flushed face. And then he said flatly, "It'll cost you twenty skins. For me, I mean; you make your own deal with the head."
Sudden relief swept through Tim, so much so that he would have paid fifty or even a hundred dollars to the bartender, perhaps even every cent he'd saved since he'd come to New York. But it seemed to him that eager acceptance would make him seem too much a sucker, too much a boy, and he said, "Nothing doing. That's too damn much. I'll give you ten."
"I guess you don't need it as much as you say," the bartender said calmly. "Let's forget all about it."
"Fifteen!" Tim cried out.
"All right," the bartender said, his voice still toneless. "Fifteen for me, and you pay the lechel whatever you make up with her. Sit tight for a while and enjoy your beer."
He moved away casually to a phone hanging on the wall and started to dial a number, and Tim sat there sipping his beer and not tasting it at all. The bartender spoke a few words into the mouthpiece, listened for a moment, and then hung up the phone and came over to Tim. "Okay," he said. "Give me the fifteen."
"Where's the girl?" Tim asked. "You want a notarized receipt or something?" the bartender asked. "She'll be over as soon as she gets her pants on. Let's have the money."
Tim took out his wallet and handed the bartender a ten and a five, and then he ordered another beer and started to sip it. He had almost finished the beer when he saw a woman slip onto the stool next to him, and she said in his ear. "You want to buy me a drink first, Red?"
He turned and looked at her, and, even in his desperate state, he could see that she wasn't exactly Miss America. She was probably close to twice his age, and she had thirty or forty pounds she didn't need, and her skin was oily and her nose was a little on the long side and her lips were thick and unattractive. But, she wore a tight, low-cut dress which showed up and emphasized her big white breasts and the deep indentation where her legs met, and he moistened his lips and he said, "Sure. What're you drinking?"
"Canadian," the woman said. "Straight." He ordered the drink and it came quickly, and she drank it down in one swallow, and she got up off the stool and turned her big behind on him and he followed her out of the door.
They walked together along 45th past Broadway and then past Eighth, and as they walked she hooked her arm in his and walked very close to him, giving him plenty of leg and hip. She stopped when they passed Eight Avenue, and she said, "The price is twenty plus seven for the hotel room."
She bent toward him as she said it, and her big brassiere-less breasts moved almost out of her dress, letting him see their heavy fullness and the red length of her nipples. His lips were dry again, and he moistened them once and he nodded and said, "Okay. Fine."
The woman smiled at him, showing dingy teeth, and then he followed her as she turned into the doorway of a little hotel he'd never even noticed before, even though he'd passed that street many times. The hotel was even crummier than the bar had been, so decrepit and anonymous that its sign just carried the word "Hotel" without even a name, but he walked eagerly up the stairs after her until she stopped in front of a small counter at the head of the stairs.
There was a wizened little man sitting behind the counter and reading the Morning Telegraph, and writing down racing selections on a soiled strip of paper. The woman said, "Give him his seven and sign the register."
Tim handed the man a five dollar bill and two singles, and he signed the register, with nervous unoriginality, James Smith. The man grinned sneeringly at the register and said, "Put Mr. and Mrs. in front of it," and Tim did this, and then he followed the woman as she moved swayingly along the corridor and into an unlocked room.
The room was obviously not meant for living in; it was meant strictly for the purpose for which it was about to be used. It had no dresser or bureau and no sink, just an old wooden chair and a big old bed, and the woman sat down on the bed and began wordlessly to remove her clothes.
Tim stood with his back against the door, staring at her, watching her opening her dress and seeing her white shoulders and her big red-capped breasts. Her breasts were not quite objects of beauty, either, seen completely naked; they were huge and fleshy and they sagged against her thick body. But they were the first pair that Tim had ever seen in real life, not counting pictures and the stag films, and the white flesh and long red nipples made him almost faint with desire. Then the woman had removed her dress the rest of the way, and pulled off her half-slip and pants at the same time, and he grew almost wild as she lay there naked except for her spike-heeled shoes and moved her legs apart.
He realized suddenly that the woman was frowning at him. "Take your clothes off, too, Red," she said. "We haven't got all night."
He obeyed quickly, pulling off his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt so hastily that he tore off several of the buttons. Then he followed with his shoes and stockings and his undershirt and trousers and shorts, and then he lay awkwardly down on the bed next to her.
The woman moved at once, sitting up so that she loomed above him, and he felt her hot mouth on his forehead and his eyes and then on his mouth. He kissed her harshly when her mouth brushed over his and tightened his arms around her neck when her tongue slipped inside his mouth, but she remained there for only a moment. And then she moved down -- kissing his throat and nibbling lightly at his nipples and then kissing his chest and his belly and running her tongue around in the small indentation of his naval. When the woman reached other areas and began to make love to him there with her lips. Tim felt a kind of wild exhilaration and delight such as he'd felt before in his life, and he dug his fingers into the woman's hair and began to twist and turn his body in rhythm with her movements Suddenly, he forgot all the things which were unpleasant about the woman, such as the fact that she was probably nearly forty to his twenty, and the fact that she was too fat and not really very good-looking; suddenly, she was the most beautiful and wonderful woman on earth and on all the stars, and his body strained and tensed and he held her very tight against him.
And then, as his tenseness increased and the muscles of his middle began to tighten, he moved quickly, and he pushed the woman's mouth and face away from him and moved her so that she lay against the bed, and then he turned and lunged toward her so that he fell heavily on top of her.
He heard the woman's breath whoosh out of her at the crushing pressure of his entry, and he moaned again as the woman threw her arms and legs around him and she began to rock and twist beneath him. He did not stop to think of it in just that way, but it was obvious that she made up in experience for what she lacked in grace and beauty, and the sensations she gave him as she moved her hips and wriggled her buttocks and rubbed her belly against his were indescribably wonderful. He became so light-headed that it seemed to him for a moment almost as though he were going to faint and suddenly he ducked his head down and caught one of her big breasts and bit sharply into the soft flesh; and in that same instant his fingernails tore at her buttocks and he finished.
The woman did not let him go immediately; she continued to hold her self tight around his waist until she was sure that his conclusion was complete. Then she lay back on the bed and smoked a cigarette and watched him as he dressed and put a twenty dollar bill down on the bed alongside her.
She did not leave with him when he was ready to go. She said she was going to lie around and rest for a few minutes, and he had the sudden intuitive realization that she'd wait until he was gone and hit the desk clerk for a share of the seven dollars, but it didn't bother him. He still felt as though he were walking on air, and he grinned at her wordlessly and left the room and walked down the rickety stairs to the street.
It was only when he had walked a couple of blocks that revulsion came to him. He was suddenly struck and sickened by the tawdriness of the experience he had just undergone. All at once, just as though he had never thought about it before, he thought of the hooker's fat ugliness and her age and her blunt commercialism and of the ugly filthiness of the surroundings in which he had just had his first taste of love, and he was suddenly and violently nauseous.
And to his absolute amazement and for the first time in his life, he was suddenly rackingly sick right there in the street.
* * *
Liz Lawrence, the girl who lived right next door to Tim in 303 came to a decision that night, too, at almost the same time Tim did, and again their lives continued in amazing parallel. For she decided, too, that it was time to put an end to virginity.
But since she was a woman -- and a blonde, long-legged beauty as well -- she knew it would not be necessary for her to go to any elaborate length to bring this about. Her plan was far more simple than Tim's she decided simply to go for a long, slow walk through Central Park and let some likely-looking young man pick her up, and then say 'Yes' when he made his pass.
She left the department store at which she worked at exactly six-fifteen. She had a light dinner at Stouffer's and walked up to the Park and began to stroll slowly through it. It was a lovely June evening, softly warm and breezy without being at all hot, and it was still light at that hour, and would remain so far quite a long while.
Nobody even approached her.
She continued to walk slowly and hopefully, but as she continued to walk and was neither approached nor hailed, sharp disappointment began to build up in her, mingled with a growing surprise. She just couldn't understand it; boys always flirted with her and tried to pick her up, and she'd been sure this would happen more than ever if she walked all alone and obviously available on this beautiful Spring evening: Her surprise was entirely the result of her inexperience with the town, because the lack of male maneuvers stemmed strictly from the situation and had nothing to do with her personally at all. An experienced New York girl with the same notion wouldn't even have bothered with Central Park at that hour; it just wasn't the time and the place and there probably wouldn't be any interesting men around. Because Central Park at that hour is the time for old people and for nursemaids taking their young charges out for a brief after-dinner airing before bedtime; it just isn't thought of as a pick-up spot.
Liz didn't know this, and she continued to walk along, so disappointed now that she was close to tears. And then, abruptly, she stopped and stood absolutely still, her disappointment forgotten as a sudden wave of fear swept her because she realized that the sun had left the sky and the street-lights had clicked on. She'd been so immersed in her unhappy thoughts that she just hadn't given any attention to the fact that this was the way it happened on June nights: one minute it was light and bright and the world looked friendly, and the very next minute, like a bulb being turned off, night had arrived and everything around her was ominously black.
She looked around her in a kind of panic, realizing that she'd walked further than she'd thought and was in the bad part of the park, and at the same moment she realized with deep fright that there was absolutely no one else in sight -- none of the comforting old man and women and nursemaids with baby carriages and kids in tow. And all at once, every ugly story she'd heard about Central Park sprang into her mind: the stories of the muggings and the knifings and the robberies, and the fact that the authorities had even made it against the law to remain in the Park after dark.
She turned and began to walk quickly back in the direction in which she had come, her high-heeled shoes tapping as she hurried toward the nearest exit so that she could run out of the Park to the safety of Fifth Avenue and take a cab or a bus back to the Madison-Plaza. Her notion to meet a boy and let herself be seduced was completely forgotten; all she wanted now was to get back to the comfort of Room 303. And in her panic her hurried walk became a run.
She had gone only a quarter of a block or so when, out of nowhere, the two boys in the bright sport-shirts appeared and confronted her.
They appeared so suddenly and unexpectedly that she was startled into an abrupt stop, but, ironically, her first response to the sight of them was one of relief. It was comforting to see other human beings in all that lonely blackness and they looked harmless despite the greasy length of their hair. But then she saw the ugly smiles on their faces and the glitter of their eyes, and her relief changed to a tight, twisting ball of fear at the pit of her stomach.
She tried to move past them, but they stepped together easily so that her passage was blocked. And then one of them, the taller one said softly, "What's your hurry, doll?"
Her mouth was dry with fear, but she said, "I -- I'm meeting my boy friend. He'll be along her� any minute. You'd better let me pass... "
"That right?" the boy said casually, and he didn't move. "What you meeting him in here for? You two got a little party planned?"
His grin widened sneeringly, and Liz didn't answer him; she moved quickly and tried to walk around the boys and past them. For an instant, the taller boy looked as though he was going to block her again: but then, to her relief, he stepped aside and bowed elaborately and mockingly.
"Don't get nervous, doll," he said. "You want to go, go ahead."
She stared at him for a moment, her brown eyes wide, and, struggling, to hide her relief, she started to walk rapid away from the boys. And then, suddenly, she felt the boy's leg against hers and tripping her, and the move was so unexpected that she felt her balance and fell, sprawling awkwardly, to the ground. And instantly, the shorter boy had swooped down and put a grimy hand over her mouth, and the other boy caught hold of her arms and pulled her roughly off the path and into the concealment of the trees and bushes.
Then she felt the taller boy moving down to he on top of her, and she heard him say, "Your boy friend's gonna have to wait his turn. You're in for it, doll, so you might as well lay back and enjoy it." Abruptly, the other boy's hand moved away from her mouth and she opened her mouth to scream. But then she felt the cold steel of a knife against her, and the tall boy said, "Make one sound and you're dead, sweetheart," and she slumped back silently against the grass.
As she lay there, she felt her skirt being pulled up and her pants being torn away from her, and she had time for one solitary, bitter thought. Well, she thought, this is what you wanted, isn't it? And then the boy had lunged downward and entered her roughly and brutally, and all thoughts left her and she had to bite her teeth into her lip to keep from screaming aloud in pain.
Afterward, she wondered if perhaps she'd fainted then, but realized that she hadn't, because she remembered it all, even though she remembered it dimly and through a kind of haze. She remembered the tall boy pulling her legs up around him and then bucking back and forth, and then grunting as he concluded; and then she remembered him moving away and the other boy replacing him, and the other boy opening the top of her dress and clutching at her young breasts and her long nipples and then entering her, too. And she remembered that the second one made a funny kind of whistling sound through his nose when he concluded.
Then the first boy had returned and taken her again, and this time, despite the horror of the situation, she felt response inside herself and she did not have to be forced to throw her arms and legs around him as their bodies twisted and thrust together. And when the boy put his mouth on hers and kissed her, she kissed him back as bruisingly as he kissed her, and it seemed to her that she felt her own spasms of completion at the same moment she felt his.
And then the second boy returned again, and she joined in with him, too, kissing him and holding him and swaying her buttocks and concluding simultaneously with him.
Afterward, they moved off and left her as abruptly as they appeared, and she lay there in shock and listened to their parting words.
"You've got me to thank," she heard the tall boy say. "I warmed her up for you -- she was nothing for me the first time. I'll tell you the truth, I think she was a virgin... "
"Crazy!" the other boy said. "She was okay when I climbed on all right... " Then their voices faded into the distance, and she lay still on the grass for a long time after that, trying to recover and afraid to move, anyway, because she was afraid they'd hear her and decide to come back. Then, slowly and painfully, she stood up, and she walked back onto the path, and this time she made her way to the exist and out of the park without encounter.
It took her perhaps ten minutes to steady herself enough to be able to flag down a cab. And before she did, her life continued its curious parallel with Tim Hal-loran's. For she, too, had had her first taste of sex that night, and, just before she hailed the cab, she too, was suddenly and violently sick on the street.
* * *
In the cab on the way from the 42nd Street movie house to her room at the Madison-Plaza, Jane Matthews learned that the man with the glen plaid suit and the hairline moustache was named Dave Forrest. Away from the darkness of the theatre, he looked even cheaper and cruder than he'd looked when she'd first sat down next to him, but this bothered her not at all because he'd ignored the cabbie and put one arm around her and the other hand under her skirt the moment they got into the taxi. And as he crushed her closer to him and touched and stroked her where her legs met her hunger for him was so all-consuming that she could have screamed out in her anxiety to get to Room 304.
It seemed to take forever, but finally they were there and Forrest had paid the cabbie and they walked quickly to the elevator and took it up to third floor and entered her room. And the moment Forrest closed the door and flicked on the light and sat down on a big easy chair, she moved over to him quickly and sat down on his lap.
"You don't waste a second, do you?" he said chidingly, but the chiding wasn't on the square, and there was hungry pleasure in his voice and in his eyes. And as their mouths met and their tongues caught and held together, he reached in back of her and pulled down the zipper of her dress so that her dress fell away to the waist.
He opened her brassiere next and her breasts showered suddenly bare, big and white and red-tipped. He put a hand on her right breast, cupping it in his palm and squeezing his fingers open and closed, and her slim body trembled on his lap.
He continued to kiss her, and continued to play with her breast, squeezing its trembling softness and stroking and fingering her hardened nipple. And suddenly she became almost violent against him, moving her body against his and twisting and wriggling her buttocks. And after a moment, he began to move, too, twisting in his chair and bucking his hardness up against her.
They continued this way for a few minutes, their mouths and tongues never apart. Then, abruptly, he moved his mouth away and caught his breath, and then he said. "This is no good. Let's get our clothes off."
Jane stool up eagerly, and, her wild heat making her movements exaggerated, she swung her hips churningly so that her dress slipped downward. Then she pulled the dress off her to the floor and stepped out of it, and, while Forrest undressed too, she took off her pants and kicked off her shoes and rolled her stockings down and off. She waited an additional moment until he had gotten the last of his clothes off and then she stepped forward, and they pressed their naked bodies together and put their arms around each other and held each other tightly.
Then Forrest sat down on the easy chair again and Jane sat down on his lap, facing him, and put her mouth against his. He put one hand on her slim, lovely back and the other on both of her breasts and squeezed them together, and as they kissed he bucked upward suddenly and they were as one.
The sensation and the relief were so strong that she pulled her mouth away from his and cried out sharply, and then she put her mouth down on his neck and bit savagely into his skin and flesh. He grimaced at the pain but tightened his grip on her back and her breasts, his fingers squeezing bruisingly against her, and their bodies began to rock and grind together.
They plunged together and apart for many minutes, their bodies moist with perspiration, and sounds of passion escaping their lips. And then, together, their legs and bodies tensed and tightened, and suddenly they twisted into the spasms of completion.
Jane did not move off his lap immediately after that; she remained there with her arms around Forrest and her eyes blissfully closed. She was still in that position, happy and contented and her eyes closed, when she was stunned by the sudden rocking blow of Forrest's fist against her face.
Her head jerked back and her eyes sprang open, she stared in bewilderment at him, unable to think what she had done to anger him. And as she stared, he hit her again with his fist, viciously, and she saw a froth-flecked grin on his lips and knew that she had not angered him at all. This was something else entirely.
She had been around a lot, and she heard a lot of things and fear laced swiftly through her because she knew what this was. She had picked the worst of all possible love-partner: a sadist.
As it happened, this was not the first time for her. Once before, she had picked up a man in a bar who had turned out to get special kicks that way, and, after he had taken her, he had begun to hit her and had beaten her so savagely that she had spent nearly a month in a hospital. That had been a long time ago, but the memory of it was still fresh and bitter within her, and she moved off Forrest's lap and started to back away from him,.
He stood up, then, and moving, still grinning and breathing heavily and excitedly, toward her, he continued to stalk her relentlessly until she had backed up against the wall. And when she stood there and held her hands in front of her face, he stepped up to her smilingly and hit her so hard that she fell heavily to the floor.
Then he bent over her, breathing passionately the fixed smile never leaving his face. And he continued to hit her and kick her, his thin lips trembling with excitement, long after she had lapsed into unconsciousness.
She was unconscious almost an hour, and when she opened her eyes he had gone. She managed to get to her feet and drag herself over to her bed. She fell heavily on it and slept all through the rest of the night and all through the next day. When she finally became completely awake the next evening, it was almost nine o'clock, and she found that she was whimpering like a dog whose body had just been struck by a passing truck.
She got out of. bed, feeling so shaky and so faint that she had to steady herself against it for a moment, and then she walked over to a mirror and look at herself. She shuddered at the sight; her face was a mass of welts and cuts and bruises.
She picked up a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit a cigarette and took deep, long drags at it, and then she crushed it out and went into the bathroom and took a long, soothing shower. She went to her closet and started to dress, and she suddenly realized that she was crying again.
She couldn't go on living this way, so desperate with need all the time that she had to go out and get herself a man, any kind of man, even a monster like this one. She just couldn't. And the realization gave her added strength and determination and she completed dressing a bit more quickly.
Just before she left, she looked again at the little piece of paper she'd taken from one of her desk drawers, and made sure she remembered the address. Then she put on a hat with a little veil, disregarding the fact that she looked odd wearing a veiled hat on that warm night, and she went downstairs and out into the street and got a cab. She gave the driver the address on upper Park Avenue at 90th Street The building was an oldish one but still very swank, and the office she wanted was on the street floor She walked past the doorman, ignoring his curious glance at her veiled face, and she looked at the little nameplate before she turned the knob and walked in: Scott Carrington, M. D.
She was in luck. She felt weak with relief -- she felt she'd have collapsed if he hadn't been there when she'd finally gotten the courage to come after all these years. But that didn't matter, because he was there -- even though his office hours were obviously over. He was alone and looked as if he was closing up and getting ready to leave.
He was much younger than she'd imagined he would be; a tall, slight man of no more than mid-thirties, with close-cropped dark hair and perceptive brown eyes under horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed startled at her abrupt entrance, and he stared when she lifted her veil and he saw bruised and battered face.
"My God!" he said, and he stepped forward quickly and put a hand gently under her chin and lifted her face so that he could study it more closely.
"I need your help, Doctor," Jane said faintly.
He continued to stare at her and hold his hand under her chin, and he shook his head at her massive injuries. "I'm not a general practitioner," he said, and she knew he assumed she'd been hurt somewhere near his office and had stumbled into the nearest place with an M. D. shingle. "I'm a psychiatrist. But I won't send you away in that condition -- I'll do what I can for you."
The walls suddenly began to blur before Jane's eyes, and she swayed, and Carrington put an arm quickly around her to steady her. And as he held her, she said. "These bruises are nothing. I -- I came to you because I know you're a psychiatrist." And then she was sobbing rackingly. "You've got to help me, Doctor," she said. "For God's sakes, help me... " The newly-weds in the bridal suite, Kenny and Emily Norris, did not hear the commotion in Jane Matthew's room at all. They slept unhappily but heavily all through the night, in separate rooms and with the door locked between them.
In the morning, Kenny awoke suddenly to see Emily sitting on a chair, fully dressed and waiting for him, and he covered himself quickly in unexpected embarrassment, and then he went into the bathroom and shaved and showered and dressed. Then they went down to the Madison-Plaza's coffee shop and had breakfast, an unspoken armed truce forming between them.
Neither one mentioned their fiasco of a wedding night, and the subject was not raised at all through the rest of the day. They spent the morning shopping, and then they had lunch and went to a movie and then did a little more shopping and then had dinner, and they might have been a typical newlywed couple except for the fact that they were faintly distant toward each other and never put their hands on each other.
After dinner, they made the rounds of the ticket brokers and managed to get a couple of tickets to How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and they laughed uproaringly throughout the show and the tension seemed to be breaking down between them. But, when they returned to Suite 305-6 at the Madison- Plaza, the tension returned instantly and as strongly as ever; and when Kenny took a sudden impulsive step toward Emily, she stepped quickly away from him and walked into the next room and slammed the door behind her.
She did not lock the door this time, but Kenny made no move to open the door and follow her; he just stared sickly at the door for a moment, and then he turned away. And after a moment, when she did not come back into the room, he plumped himself down defiantly in front of the television set and flicked on the Late Show.
The picture was horrible and, worse than that, he'd seen it before, but he continued to watch it stubbornly, keeping the sound on fairly loud and hoping that Emily would worry about his indifference and come into the room -- or even just come in to argue about the volume so he could get a conversation started with her and get rid of this ridiculous war of theirs. But one thing he wasn't going to do, he told himself, jutting his chin forward, was go crawling into that next room after her.
He watched three-quarters of the picture with most of his mind on his slim, dark-haired, lovely new wife in the next room. But she remained there, so quietly that he couldn't hear a sound from her over the loud television set, and she did not come through the door, and at twelve-thirty he flipped the off-switch bitterly and started to undress.
He took off all his clothes and crawled naked between the sheets, because he liked to sleep raw, but he felt so tense and unsatisfied that he was sure that he'd be doing no sleeping this night. Less than fifteen minutes later, he was fast asleep.
The suite was completely soundless for another half hour. And then, very slowly, the door began to open, and Emily's lovely young face looked into the room in which Kenny lay asleep.
Like her husband, she'd gotten into bed, too, but unlike him, she'd been unable to sleep. She'd lay there and waited for him to come and get in with her, sure that he would. But he hadn't, and finally she'd been unable to stand it any longer, and she'd opened the door to sneak a look and see what he was doing.
Faint frown lines appeared between her eyebrows when she saw that he was fast asleep, and she started to turn angrily on her heel and walk back into the other room. But then she stopped suddenly, and she walked very lightly and quietly toward the sleeping figure on the bed.
Kenny had kicked the covers away from him in his sleep, and he lay now completely and visibly naked. It was this which had caused Emily to change her mind and come toward him: the attractive, exciting look of his hard-muscled, naked young body. She was a little embarrassed at her boldness, and at the excitement the look of him created in her, but she made no effort to resist it. She walked noiselessly up to the bed, and stood there looking down at him.
She stood there for a many minutes, but he did not stir; he did not move or awaken the way many people do when they sense someone looking at them in their sleep. Kenny lay there unmoving and fast asleep, and suddenly Emily kneeled alongside him and leaned toward him.
Then, very lightly, she ran her hand over his little nipple and his belly, and then, quickly and shyly she put her hand elsewhere. He seemed to stir slightly at the touch and she pulled her hand away quickly, her lace flaming, wondering what on earth she would say if he woke and saw her doing what she was doing particularly after the big fight they'd had the previous night. But he did not move again, and after a moment she put her hand back on his body.
He didn't stir this time, and she began to move her hand lightly around him, running her palm and fingers over his body and sliding her hand down to touch his buttocks. And when he continued to sleep, she put her hand back and held his body and began to caress him.
Suddenly, she became aware of the fact that she had begun to breathe rapidly and her entire body felt rosy and warm, and then she realized that she had moved her free hand unconsciously up to her own breast and had begun to caress it while she touched her husband. She got up quickly, feeling embarrassed and flustered, and she let go of herself at once, but she could not take her eyes off Kenny's body. And she made a sudden decision and started to remove her clothing.
She had been wearing only a robe and pajamas, and she slipped off the robe and then quickly opened the pajama-top and removed it. She looked down at her breasts, proud of their snow-white beauty and of the fact that they were so full and pointed so erectly high without support, and, with a quick look at Kenny to make sure he was still asleep, she took her breasts in her hands and squeezed and caressed them for a moment. And then she slipped off her pajama-bottoms and, shapely and slim and completely naked, she walked back to the bed.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, and for a long time she just sat there and stared down at her husband's body. Then she bent suddenly and moved her race downward.
CHAPTER SIX
The Zacharys and the Grahams got together at nine o'clock the next morning with Bill Graham knocking on the door of Room 307 and pretending to be a house detective who believed that Vic and Grace Zachary were actually an unmarried couple who checked into the hotel on a shack-up deal. They all roared with laughter when Vic threw open the door, his face contorted with righteous indignation, and then they went down together to the Madison-Plaza coffee shop and had a hilarious breakfast, full of kidding and full of laughs.
After breakfast, they all admitted to each other that they really went for the traditional sightseeing stuff, even if it did label them as hicks-from-the-sticks tourists, and they went on to have a wonderful morning and afternoon together. They went to the Empire State Building gaping unashamedly at the panoramic view of the city and of the Jersey coast, and they took a sightseeing bus around Chinatown and Greenwich Village, and they saw a movie at Radio City Music and marvelled together at the luxury of the place, and they even went out and had a look at the Statue of Liberty.
They returned to the Madison-Plaza around six o'clock, and they made no plans to get together again that evening; they simply said they'd be seeing each other at the furniture show, Which began the following morning. This was another example of their innate and instinctive courtesy toward each other: each couple sensed that, even though they hit it off together so beautifully, this too could become a bore if they remained within constant sight of one another. And so, knowing they'd spent all day together and would be spending the next day together at the show, and without even discussing it aloud they gave each other the evening apart.
The trouble started between the Zachary's when the two couples separated and they returned to Room 307. They were both footsore and ordered a room-service dinner, and, when the food arrived and they were dining, they started to discuss possible plans for the evening. And within minutes, they were in the midst of a bitter and violent argument.
The argument wasn't about anything important at all, but then, arguments between long-married and bored-with-each-other couples frequently aren't. Despite this, the arguments frequently lead in a straight line to the divorce courts. This particular argument resulted from the fact that Vic wanted to hit ticket brokers and spend the evening where he could sit down quietly and watch a good musical or a good comedy and soothe his aching feet. But Grace didn't; she'd been told that Thursday night was the night on which New York department stores and specialty shops stayed open late, and she wanted to spend the evening doing a lot of shopping at those places with the magical New York names and labels.
"For God's sake, Grace." Vic snapped. "We've spent the whole damn day walking our feet oft, and lm bushed. I'd like to spend tonight sitting down somewhere!"
"But we've already seen one show today," Grace said, her redheaded temper flaring and her voice no less angry than her husband's, "even if it was only a movie. We can see a Broadway show some other night, maybe with the Grahams. And what's there to see, anyway?"
She was right in a way, of course, because even in Chicago they had heard that the 1961-62 theatre season had been one of the worst of recent years, with one dog after another yelping into town. But she wasn't entirely right, because, despite the dogs, there had been some damn good ones, and Vic lost no time in pointing this out. "What's there to see?" he said sarcastically. "Oh, absolutely nothing at all. Just How To Succeed In Business, and Carnival, and Gideon, and The Night o) the Iguana, and maybe a dozen others."
"I still want to go shopping," Grace said stubbornly. "This is the only evening during our stay that the stores are open late, and we won't be able to do any shopping during the daytime after this -- we'll be busy at the show at the Coliseum."
"If you go shopping," Vic said nastily, "you'll go alone... " And that was the way it was settled, though they continued to snap at each other for quite a while afterward, before they both really believed that the other meant it. And finally Grace changed into a dark-green, clinging dress which emphasized the loveliness of her tall figure, fixed her face, and then went slamming out of the door, heading for midtown Fifth Avenue and Saks and Best and Peck and Peck and all the other stores; and a few minutes later, Vic shaved and changed his suit and his shirt and tie and went over to the Broadway area to see what the ticket brokers had to offer in the way of a single.
Each went away bitterly and angrily, and each had the same thought: the Grahams would never have acted this way. They were a close-knit, loving couple who'd remain together for the evening no matter what, even if they both did want to do different things.
* * *
The Zachary were wrong. The Grahams had dinner at the Madison-Plaza's restaurant and also talked about plans for the evening while they ate, and their discussion, too, turned quickly into a bitter argument. The only difference at all was that they argued in lower tones because they were in a public place, and their positions were reversed on how they wanted to spend the evening.
It was Reggie Graham who wanted to spend the evening at a Broadway show. She was not one to be much interested in shopping because she felt that the Des Moines stores were satisfactory enough, just as good in their way as the New York shops because they got their share of exclusive and imported styles, and she had enough clothes for the moment But, she was not satisfied with Des Moines' theatre life, since there wasn't any, and she'd been a sort of star-struck girl who went to the movies a lot and was excited about the idea of seeing people like Henry Fonda and Anna Marie Alberghetti and Olivia deHaviland in person on the stage.
Bill Graham, on the other hand had no particular interest at all in the theatre and in show-business people and probably would not have gone to the theatre in Des Moines even if it had existed. And he was not satisfied with the men's clothing emporium in Des Moines, always had the sneaking feeling that the stuff he bought and wore back home always made him look like the proverbial big noise from Hicksville, and had been looking forward particular by to this longer visit to New York because he wanted to spend a lot of green at places like Brooks Brothers and De Pinna's.
And very rapidly, the argument between Reggie and Bill Graham became, despite the low tones, just as virulent and snarling as the argument between Grace and Vic Zachary. It ended the same way: with Reggie and Bill saying goodbye to each other for the evening, all cold-eyed and stiff-lipped, and going their separate ways.
* * *
A half hour later, Vic Zachary found himself ready to give up his idea of going to the theatre, and was half-wishing he hadn't quarreled with Grace. He'd visited no less than fifteen brokers and hadn't gotten anywhere at all: they'd laughed at him when he'd mentioned plays like Mary, Mary and Carnival, pointing out that these were among the biggest hits in town and he wanted to see them that same night, and less than an hour before show-time at that. And the only tickets they were prepared to offer him were last-row stuff for shows he'd heard were absolutely lousy and he just didn't want to see.
He decided to hit just two or three more of the ticket agencies, and then, if he couldn't get anything, he'd either just go to another movie or maybe even go back to the hotel and go to bed and read a book and the hell with it. But he didn't have much hope as he walked into the sixteenth store and stepped up to the counter and asked one of the men behind it what, if anything, he had available for that evening.
He was partly right in his feeling of lack of hope; the agency had nothing at all left for any of the famous shows. But they did, the clerk said, have tickets for one of the musicals. And while Vic had never heard anything good about the musical, he hadn't really heard anything bad about it either, and he seized the opportunity eagerly. "I'll take it!" he said, his deep-set grey eyes alight.
"Fine," the ticket agent said. "That'll be $21.30."
Vic stared at the man. "$21.30?" he echoed. "Isn't that a lot for one ticket?"
The ticket salesman stared back at him. "It sure would be," he said, "but that isn't the price for one ticket. That's for the pair."
"But I don't want a pair," Vic said. "I just want a single." He added lying without quite understanding why he was doing so, "I -- I'm in town all by myself."
The ticket agent started to put the tickets back on his rack. "I'm awfully sorry, sir," he said. "I just didn't realize that because nearly everybody who come in buys in pairs. I'd rather not break this set up -- it's less than an hour until curtain, and I might not be able to get rid of another single."
Vic continued to stare at the man, bewildered, not knowing quite what to say. And then a soft, husky voice, a woman's voice, said just behind him, "I'll take that other single."
Vic turned and looked at the woman at the same time as the ticket agent did, and his look became open-mouthed in surprise. And the woman stared back at him in surprise, too, now that he had turned and she could see his face. Because the woman was Reggie Graham.
"Well for heaven's sake." Reggie said. "Well, I'll be damned!" Vic said. "Where's Ml tonight?"
"Not with me," Reggie said. "Where's Grace?"
"Not with me," Vic said.
The ticket salesman cut in on their colloquy. "Are you people going to take these tickets or aren't you?" he asked.
"Only if the lady'll be my guest," Vic said gallantly. And when Reggie murmured that they'd settle that part later but for God's sakes grab those tickets before somebody else did, Vic put down twenty-two dollars and a moment later scooped up the two tickets and the change.
They told each other what had happened while they walked to the theatre, laughing over the fact of their mutual argument and for exactly the same reasons, and Reggie kidding Vic over his unnecessary lie about being alone in town just because he was secretly embarrassed at having had a tiff with his wife. And they argued good-humoredly about Vic's payment for the tickets, Reggie insisting that she wouldn't let him pick up the tab and she'd give him the money the moment they got back to the hotel, and Vic saying it wasn't often he got the opportunity to take out a beautiful married woman on the loose and he was damned if he'd take back a cent.
But then, as they walked, arm in arm and their bodies close together, their mood began to change, their kidding conversation fell away and they grew silent, their silence punctuated only by swift little glances they threw at each other when each thought the other was not looking. And for the first time, they began to see each other as an attractive woman and man rather than as faceless and inseparable parts of a couple of husband-and-wife teams who had a lot of fun together.
For the first time, Vic found himself looking at Reggie with pulse-quickening interest, admiring her petite little figure, so much in contrast with his wife's tallness, admiring her vivid dark eyes and hair and thinking how excitingly different she was from Grace's pale-skinned, red-haired coloring, realizing how really beautiful she was. And for the first time, Reggie found excitement beginning to build within her as she looked at the man who walked alongside her and whose arm occasionally brushed her full breasts, contrasting him with her husband -- contrasting his broad-shouldered, athletic good looks with her husband's almost scholarly stoop-shoulderedness, contrasting Vic's close-cropped dark hair, so distinguished-looking with its greying temples, with Bill's pale blondness. And she knew that her sudden breathlessness was not the result of their fast walk.
When they got to the theatre and sat down in their seats, their legs touched and did not move apart, and a few moments later their hands stole together in the darkness and met and held.
* * *
Grace Zachary had much better luck in finding what she set out to purchase: she made purchases in every store she visited, thrilled and excited at the ultra-new fashions she found in every one of the big and famous stores along Fifth Avenue. By the time closing-hour arrived, she had purchased and ordered sent to the Madison-Plaza nearly six hundred dollars worth of things.
She did not return to the hotel immediately after the stores began to close; she knew Vic would not be out of whatever show he'd gone to see until eleven-fifteen or so and not back at the Madison-Plaza until close to midnight. And anyway, she still felt happy and exhilarated and didn't feel like going back and cooping herself up in some hotel room, and there were still a lot of stores she hadn't visited and it was almost as much fun walking along Fifth Avenue and window-shopping as it was actually going inside and buying.
She began to walk slowly downtown along Fifth Avenue, stopping at almost every story and looking at every item in every window and having a great time. She was deeply immersed in one particularly interesting window display, trying to figure out how she'd be able to sneak out of the show for an hour next day because there were a couple of things in that store she definitely wanted to buy, when she was suddenly startled by the touch of a hand on her shoulder.
"Hey, lady," a deep male voice said in her ear, "can a handsome boyish stranger pick you up?"
She whirled toward the speaker, her beautiful face starting to freeze, but the freeze turned to a smile of pleasant when she realized that it was Bill Graham. "Well, hello I" she said, pleased. "Don't tell me that you and Reggie are spending the evening shopping, too!"
Even as she said it, she realized that Reggie was not with him, and she saw him shake his head. "Not Reggie," he said. "I'm strictly a bachelor tonight. Reggie and I had a little difference of opinion about what to do tonight, and this is one argument we both won. She wanted to go to the theatre and I wanted to take advantage of the late store hours and do some shopping, so we're going to the theatre and shopping -- separately." He grinned at him. "I'm not complaining, mind you. I practically bought out some of the stores here and on Madison Avenue, and Reggie would have fainted if she'd been along and seen the size of some of the checks I wrote." He suddenly seemed to realize that she was alone, too, and he said, "Hey, where's Vic?"
"Probably in the next seat to Reggie somewhere," Grace said, though she'd have been stunned if she'd known it was true. "We had exactly the same situation, only just the opposite -- Vic was the one who insisted on going to the theatre." She smiled back at Bill. "No complaints on my part, either," she said. "I've been spending money like I have an unlimited supply -- I'd never have had the nerve to go off on a spree like this if Vic had been with me."
"We ought to play switch or something," Bill said, and was started to see sudden color flare in Grace's lovely face and shade her clear white skin. "Anyway," he went on quickly, "in the meantime, let's comfort each other in our loneliness by doing the rest of our window-shopping together. Our respective spouses won't be back to join us for a couple of hours or so."
"I second the motion," Grace said.
They walked together down Fifth Avenue, slowly and close together and enjoying and discussing the interesting windows, but their mood did not take long to change. At one of the big jewelry displays, Grace's awed examination of the big diamond rings and the bracelets ended abruptly when she suddenly saw Bill's reflection in the glass and realized that he was looking at her and not at the jewelry. She was suddenly and fiercely glad that she had worn the clinging, flattering green dress, and, almost as though she were no longer under her own control, she turned slowly and stood there looking back at him.
They stood there for a long time looking at each other with sudden breathlessness, almost as though they had never seen each other before, their bodies and faces so close together that their mouths almost touched. And they might have kissed right then and there in full view of the street if there hadn't been so many other people around on the balmy June night.
This was ridiculous, Grace thought as they stood there so close together; she was a married woman and had always been completely faithful to her husband and didn't even have the right to be thinking thoughts like the ones which were rushing through her mind. But even as she reminded herself of her never-failing faithfulness, she brushed the thought impatiently aside, and she compared the man who stood close to her with Zachary and found herself favoring Bill Graham. He wasn't as good-looking as Vic, she was ready to admit that. He wasn't as well-built or as ramrod-straight, and he wasn't quite as handsome as Vic, as far as regularity of features was concerned, but his thin blondness had a kind of depth of sensitivity which seemed to her at that moment to be totally lacking in her husband. Bill looked, she thought suddenly, as though he had downdeep passion which would make him absolutely great in bed once this was brought forth; and she was immediately embarrassed at the thought.
And she knew, as they stood there, that he was looking at her with the same sudden, unexpected longing, and probably contrasting her with his marriage-partner, too. The thought, strangely, made her feel completely happy and confident Reggie was good-looking enough, extremely pretty actually, if you liked 'em pint-sized and petite, but Grace knew that she was considerably more of a handful with her tallness -- she was actually just as tall as Bill himself -- and with her very large breasts and her full buttocks swaying tightly against her dress. And she suddenly knew, just somehow absolutely knew, that Bill's study and comparison was giving her the winning vote, too.
He said suddenly, "I think we've done enough window-shopping for tonight, don't you? Why don't we go somewhere and have a quiet drink or two and just talk?"
"I'd like that," she said quietly. He put his arm around her waist as they walked away from the store-window, his hand very close to the lower curve of her breast, and the position seemed so natural .to both of them that neither commented on it or even particularly noticed it. They turned off Fifth Avenue onto 45th Street and walked slowly to a little soft-lighted bar on 45th near Madison, and when they went inside they selected a table which allowed them to sit side by side and very close together.
* * *
Connie Franklin spent a quiet Thursday at the Madison-Plaza, mostly just lounging around Room 309 and simply enjoying the luxury of not having Husband dumber Five with her -- or, for that matter Husbands Number Four, Three, Two and One. She went down for meals, and once she spent an hour at the hairdresser's in the hotel getting herself a brand-new hairdo, but except for that she did nothing except hang around and think how good it felt to be single again and not have to pretend she was wild with passion whenever one of her husbands beckoned to her from the bed.
Toward evening, however, she began to feel a little bored.
She tried to resist the feeling for a while, tried to convince herself that she ought to stay right there in her luxurious solitude and spent an equally quiet evening just watching television, but she just couldn't work it. She was a swinger, a lover of movement and action and excitement, and around nine o'clock she stood up abruptly and went to take a shower and get dressed.
Back home, whenever she was there between marriage instead of in New York, "he had an immediate solution for restlessness. She knew the location of all the private gambling establishments, or could find out from friends if they'd made one of their frequent moves, and a couple of hours of illegal action at the crap tables always managed to soothe her as much as the legal tables did at Vegas. It was different in New York, of course: there were probably five times as many concealed gambling joints around as there were in New Orleans, but she had no idea of where they were located or how to go about finding them.
She finished dressing, looking very lush and beautiful in a tight-fitting, low-cut black dress whose color emphasized and contrasted with the platinum sheen of her hair, knowing that she didn't know where the devil she was going but still anxious to go. She'd go and have a few drinks, anyway, and perhaps she'd start talking to some hip people who could tell her where one of the better-class gambling places was located and what she had to do or say to gain admission. Or, failing that, perhaps she'd meet some man who'd take her dancing at the Copa or El Morocco or the Persian Room or somewhere like that -- provided, of course, she could meet someone who would settle for dancing and not make himself obnoxious trying to get her into the sack before the evening was half over. Dancing soothed her almost as much as gambling, dancing or even just the general festive atmosphere of night clubs, and she even thought for a moment or two of going to one herself, but finally decided against it because she knew that the better places frowned upon unescorted women or even forbid their presence entirely.
She hit a number of fancy bars in the next couple of hours, getting into pleasant conversations with a lot of nice people but finding no one who could tell her where she could find a place to do a little dice-tossing. She also had bids and overtures from at least a dozen different men, ranging from the young and collegiate to the aging and phony-courtly, but it was completely obvious that each one of them intend to fulfill her night club desire as quickly as possible and then try to get her someplace much more quiet and intimate like a bedroom, and she brushed all of them off.
By midnight, she had made no worthwhile contact, and she continued to move around town. She had had quite a few drink by now, and was feeling pretty good and not walking very steadily, but the thought of getting her hot hand around a pair of leaping dominoes had become almost an obsession. She'd given up the night club idea because she'd become convinced that every man she met that night would try to make a pass at her, and maybe it was that goddamn low-cut dress which showed practically one hundred percent of her full, white breasts, but she still continued to ask people with whom she got into conversation if they could direct her to an establishment where she could get a little dice action.
At twelve-forty, a tanned smooth-voiced man who was beautifully and conservatively dressed but struck her anyway as a high-grade thug, told her he knew a good place on the West Side where all the best people went, and he offered to take her there personally. She turned him down because she sensed that he'd try to end up at his apartment instead; she said she was meeting her husband shortly and wanted to go to the gambling joint with him, and the tanned man looked disappointed, but then he shrugged and gave her an address all the way over on West 48th and told her his name so that she and her husband could mention it and get in.
She thanked him and finished her drink and left the bar, and a minute later she was in a cab and heading, filled with excitement, for the address the man had given her.
She knew New York well enough to realize that the place was located almost down by the river judging by the number she'd been given, but that didn't bother her because she'd heard that many swank New York gambling joints were set up in beat-up, out of the way buildings which looked like garages or auto-parts places from the outside. She used her handbag mirror to adjust the lipstick on her soft, well-shaped mouth while they were driving along, and she told the driver to let her off a hundred numbers ahead of the one she wanted because she realized that gambling joint proprietors didn't like a lot of cabs stopping in front of their apparently deserted premises because that could make trouble even if they were icing the police.
The cabbie looked at her curiously when she got out in that broken-down neighborhood, but said nothing and pulled away, and she started to walk rapidly toward the address she'd been given. She'd felt no concern at all when she'd told the driver to stop and let her out, but it was a little cooler over here not too far from the waterfront, and the sudden rush of cool breeze cleared her head a little and made her realize that the neighborhood was pretty ugly and rundown and tough and deserted. The few tenements on the street were completely dark and silent, and the rest of the buildings were ominous-looking warehouses and factories.
She began to walk more rapidly, still a little unsteady because of all she'd had to drink, but beginning to feel really frightened now. Aside from what might happen to her personally if she ran into one of those maniacs who roamed around at night, she was also in danger of thugs who wouldn't be interested in her at all, but might quickly see that she was wearing a lot of jewelry and that it wasn't junk. She was almost running suddenly, and the numbers seemed to be passing with maddening slowness.
The vision of a bright-lighted gambling joint spurred her on, keeping her running even though she was becoming short of breath and beginning to make gasping, sobbing sounds. Shed be safe in there with a lot of well-to-do, nice people, and, when she was ready to leave, they'd certainly see to it that she was put safely into a cab.
She was almost at the number she'd been given when she heard the footsteps, a man's heavier footsteps, close behind her.
She didn't stop moving, but she turned and darted a look at the man as she ran, and her first thought was that he was the man she'd met in the bar and who had directed her here. Her reaction, curiously enough, was one of relief rather than anger. If he'd decided to follow her in order to try to get more friendly with her at the gambling joint, or even if there was really no gambling joint and he'd sent her to this lonely spot because he'd suspected there was no husband and wanted to get her in a deserted area by herself, that didn't really bother her because she felt that she could handle him. He'd struck her as a thug, certainly enough, but as the high-grade non-violent kind of thug who would never try to force her or anything like that; if there was no gambling joint at the address, he'd just pretend to be disappointed and surprised and say it must have been busted by the bulls and had had to move, and then he'd try to steer her by persuasion to his place. And she felt she could handle that type gracefully and without a ruffled hair, because she'd done so many times in the past.
But then she took another look and deep, cold fear touched her, because she realized that the man behind her was not the man she'd met in the bar at all. There were superficial similarities: they were both tall and rather thin and deeply tanned, but there the resemblance ended. The man in the bar was slickly handsome and a big-city type from head to toe, but this one was a sort of country type, a man who looked a little like that actor, Jimmy Stewart, except that he was growing bald and wore horn-rimmed glasses.
She wasn't sure why she was suddenly so frightened, because the man certainly looked mild enough and harmless enough; and as for what he was doing on that dark, deserted street, perhaps he was heading for the gambling joint the way she was. But there was something about him, something about the shiny, almost vacant look of his eyes under his glasses, something about the strange, cruel, twisted smile on his lips, which sent sharp terror through her. .
She knew, nothing at all of course, of his long record as a vicious rapist; and she did not recognize him as the man who lived right next door to her in Room 310 of the Madison-Plaza, the man whose name was Joe York, because they had never run into each other. Nor did he recognize her, nor had he been after her particularly. He had spent all day in Room 310 not even eating, just waiting for night to come because the need was wild and strong within him again, and he'd left the Madison-Plaza at eleven o'clock and had started to walk the deserted streets looking for a girl who was all alone.
He'd spotted Connie getting out of the cab, his first possibility despite nearly two hours of walking around the lonelier streets of Manhattan, and he'd waited until the cab had pulled away and had then started to walk quickly toward her. He didn't know that she lived right next door to him at his hotel, or he'd have rejected her immediately. He didn't know this, and he saw her only as a girl with long blonde hair and a beautiful, provocative figure, all alone on the dark and deserted street.
He jumped forward suddenly. Connie saw him, and tried to scream because the people in the gambling joint might hear her and help her. But she was too late; the man's big, clawing hand had closed over her mouth, and then he was pulling her effortlessly into a dark, dirt-strewn alleyway.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The place called "Drop Inn" looked like nothing more than an ordinary side-street bar on the outside, but, on the inside, it seemed to Ann Wentworth as though she had stepped into another world. The place was crowded, almost jammed, but, except for a bored, looking bartender behind the bar, the patrons were all women, or at least, females. They sat together on stools at the bar and talked quietly and intimately, sometimes with their arms around each other; they sat together at little tables, mostly for two, and usually in open embrace; and they danced together, their bodies tight and close.
Ann stood there in the doorway for a moment after she entered, staring in open amazement despite the fact that what she saw was what she had actually expected. Nobody in the room paid any attention to her at all, and, after a while, she saw an empty little table in a corner and sat down at it. Almost immediately, the sleepy-looking bartender had left his station behind the bar and walked over to her, and he stood there looking at her without speaking.
His presence startled her, and Ann looked up at him, wide-eyed, before she realized that he was waiting for her order. "Scotch and soda," she said quickly. "Any brand of Scotch at all."
The bartender nodded and went back to the bar and made up her drink. He brought the drink over to her, said, "Flag me if you want a refill," and then turned his back and walk heavily back to the bar. Ann felt suddenly alone and frightened, sitting there in the corner and sipping her drink.
She had been sitting there perhaps five minutes when another bulky, massive shadow fell across her table, and she looked up with a quick smile because she thought it might be the bartender and she was just about ready for another drink. The smile slipped slowly off her face when she realized that the person standing there was a woman.
She was a woman according to census -- and birth-certificate records, anyway, but it was obvious that she wasn't one now. Her hair was cut as short as any man's, and her big, square face was completely devoid of any make-up; her body was square inside her plain black turtleneck sweater and her male-cut pants. Only her big bulging breasts betrayed her femininity, and even these looked more like the sagging girth of a very fat man's chest than a sign of womanhood.
She stood looming silently over the table while Ann stared up at her, Ann's dark-blue eyes wide with fear and nervousness, and then she said, "The place is pretty crowded. Mind if I sit down here?"
Ann struggled for a moment to control her voice. Then she said, just a shade tremulously, "Not at all."
The square-faced woman sat down heavily on the chair opposite Ann's, and she put the drink she'd been carrying down on the table. She looked in silence at Ann for a few moments, and then she said, "You haven't been around here before. Sightseer?"
"I'm not sure," Ann said frankly.
An immediate look of interest flared in the other woman's eyes, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come, and she said very casually, "I know what you mean -- we get a lot of try-outers down here. Some join the club permanently, some keep coming down for a now-and-then, some find out they were wrong and it's not for them." She paused, and then she said, "My name's Bertha -- my friends call me Bert. You got a name, too?"
Well, it was open now, right out in the open; this woman knew exactly why she was here because apparently there had been many more before her with the same purpose the same desire to find out once and for all. The thought comforted her, in a way, but in another way it frightened her still more, and a minute or two ticked by before she answered, almost absently, "My name's Ann."
And now the interest in the big woman's eyes was completely unconcealed. "All right, Ann," she said softly, "if you came down here to find out, you might as well find out. I've got a nice little apartment right around the corner."
Again this was what Ann had expecting, and yet again, like the look of the place when she'd first walked through the bar, it was all so bald and so bold that it shocked her at first sight. She did not answer at once; she just sat there in silence, looking at the other woman.
The woman, this Bert, wasn't much to look at. She was probably pretty young when you looked at her closely, middle twenties at most, but she looked older because of the grossness of her features and because of the bulk of her body. There was not the slightest trace of beauty anywhere in her: this one, Ann thought, would not excite her and fill her with heat like the dark-haired girl across the way from her room at the Madison-Plaza. And yet, and yet, she represented a member of the same sex who was anxious to get into bed with her, so Ann would be able to find out. And with sudden resolution, Ann stood up and smiled down almost gaily at the big woman.
"Ill pay for my drink," she said, "and then I'll be right with you."
Bert was waiting for her at the door after she paid the bartender and received her change and left a little tip on the table. They walked close together to the building in which Bert lived, an old apartment building close to Drop Inn, and she did not protest when the big woman turned toward her in the dark hallway and slid a hand caressingly and gently along the curve of her hip and then onto her buttocks.
Instead, she moved closer to Bert so that their bodies crushed together hard, and they put their arms around each other and their mouths met. It was still strictly exploration and hope of discovery with Ann, and she was amazed to feel her heart beginning to pound very hard and a strong feeling of pleasure and heat beginning to course through her body. And she thought, with wonderment: Perhaps it doesn't matter that she isn't pretty. Perhaps all that matters is that she's another woman.
Bert's hands were very busy now, one hand squeezing her breast over her dress and the other hand sliding over the back of her dress at the curve of her buttocks; and Ann began to move her body a little, swaying and rubbing against the other woman. Bert began to move gently, too, her big body crushing against Ann's breasts and middle, and the two women kissed with increasing fierceness there in the hall.
Then, very softly, Bert said, "Let's go upstairs, Ann." And they separated and walked quickly up the stairs to Bert's apartment.
The apartment was a beautiful one, small but furnished with excellent taste entirely in Danish modern, but Ann hardly even noticed it. She found herself trembling with excitement when Bert closed the door behind them and began without a word to pull off her turtleneck sweater. Ann began to undress quickly, too, her eyes never leaving the big woman's body and just as excited now as she'd been when she'd been watching that dark-haired girl across the way, if not more so because she knew that this was just the beginning.
Without her clothes, Bert looked much more feminine. Her big breasts were definitely a woman's, soft and white and crimson-tipped and well-shaped, and not at all similar to a fat man's bulk, and her waist was surprisingly narrow for her size, and her legs were as big and solid as the rest of her but very well-curved. And when they were both naked and she walked toward Ann. She watched her approach with pleasure and excitement, and she lay down quickly on the bed when Bert motioned her to do so.
Bert lay down with unexpected grace alongside her, and she took the aggressive side of the romance at once. She put her body half over Ann's the way a man might, and she put her mouth down on Ann's and slipped her tongue into Ann's mouth, and she put one hand on Ann's right breast and slid the other down Ann's flat belly.
Ann responded immediately: she brought her tongue up to meet Bert's, the point of her tongue probing Bert's tongue and moving along it, and she put her arms around the other woman's big, solid back. And slowly, expertly, the big woman began to make love to her, kissing her fiercely and bruisingly, squeezing her breasts and pinching and stroking her long nipples.
Then, after a while, Bert changed the direction of her action: she took her mouth away from Ann's and began to move slowly down her slim body. She kissed Ann's throat and delicate shoulders, and the soft skin of her upper chest, and then she reached Ann's breasts and she stopped for a while. She ran her lips up and down the crevice between Ann's breasts for a few moments, and then, with a suddenness which sent pleasant chills through Ann, she moved her face and caught one of Ann's breasts in her mouth and she began to caress lightly at it She moved Ann's breast closer to her, and as it moved she tightened and increased the pressure of her lips and teeth on the soft flesh; and though it hurt, it also seemed to Arm to be pure delight. And then she began to shake her head so that the breast shook, too, and her lips stroked Ann's nipple over and over again, and Ann's passion became so strong that she became faint Then, a little later, Bert moved on again, moving her mouth and tongue along Ann's chest and her belly, and beyond. And when she reached her destination, she began, then, to make increasingly ferocious love to Ann, and Ann began to moan and writhe in rhythm with the other women's caresses.
Ann lay there and let the other woman make love to her for many minutes, tense with the pleasure of it; and then, almost wild with heat, she moved quickly. She pulled herself away and turned her body so that her face was close to Bert's middle, too; and as Bert again returned her affection, Ann made love to the other woman that way, too.
They continued to kiss and caress each other for what had become the most wonderful half-hour of Ann's life. And then, finally, their bodies both began to tense and tighten and strain and grow rigid, and their arms tightened around each other and they reached fulfillment together. -- They lay there in silent for many minutes, smoking, each of them too filled with contentment to find it necessary to speak. And then, suddenly, Ann sat bolt upright on the bed. The door was opening slowly, and she realized that Bert had closed the door but not locked it.
Two girls walked quietly into the room, and Ann stared at them in fear for a moment, but then she relaxed as Bert greeted them smilingly and by name, and she realized that they were what Bert would have called members of the club. Their names were Stevie, presumably for Stephanie, and Cora, presumably because there was no immediate male counterpart for the name, and they were both blondes and much more feminine-looking than Bert, but they both wore what appeared to be the uniform: black turtleneck sweaters and black male-looking pants.
Bert explained their presence casually. "They usually turn up when they see me leave the Drop with a recruit," she said. "What about it, Ann? Shall we let them join the party?"
Ann looked at them for a long moment her heart beginning to race again, and then she said, her voice suddenly as casual as Bert's, "Why, sure." And as she watched, Stevie and Cora beginning to undress taking in their slim, lovely lines with increasing excitement, she knew then that there was finally no doubt about it: she was, indeed, "one of those."
And you know something? she said to herself suddenly. I'm damn glad about it!
* * *
Tim Halloran seemed to be moving strictly through will-power as he started back for the Madison-Plaza after he'd been so suddenly and violently sick on the street. He was still quite nauseous, and his arms and legs felt heavy. He had a terrible headache, and his nausea increased every time he thought of the fat, ugly woman with whom he'd recently gone to bed, the first woman he'd ever had in his life.
He wasn't really very far from the Madison-Plaza, and he'd taken walks three times that distance a dozen times in the .last year just for fun, but it seemed to him now, that the trip was endless. He didn't want to take a cab because he thought that perhaps the air would make him feel better, and yet the distance seemed to stretch out and seem like miles. He found himself looking up at each street sign at each corner and counting the blocks still remaining until he reached the hotel. When he finally got there, he made a sound of pleasure right out loud, and he moved quickly inside and into the elevator, eager for his bed and for restful sleep.
The elevator let him off at the third floor, and he'd started to walk toward his room, 302, when he heard the elevator next to the one he'd taken open at the third floor, too. He turned his head to look, moved by nothing more than mild curiosity -- and then, abruptly, he stopped dead and stared.
A girl of about his own age had gotten out. He didn't know her, even though it was apparent that she also lived on his floor. There were two things about her which interested him immediately. The first was that she was so much his ideal type that he might have dreamed her up himself: tallish and long-legged and blonde with a cute little nose and really beautiful brown eyes and warm-looking, kissable lips. And the second thing was that she looked as woeful and down-in-the-dumps as he was; she, too, looked as sick and disgusted with life as he was sure he did.
He stood there looking at her while she walked past him to the door next to his, and when she stopped to fish in her handbag for her key, he said, on sudden impulse, "Hi."
Her head jerked toward him in surprise at his voice, and he knew she was measuring him and wondering whether to answer him in friendliness like a neighbor or freeze him as a guy trying to flirt and step quickly into her own room. And when she answered him, he felt instinctively that she'd decided to respond to his greeting for the first reason, and strictly because of good manners; he could just tell, somehow, that this one was a nice girl.
"Good evening," she said, and she smiled a little as she said it. The smile nearly rocked him on his heels. She looked even more beautiful when she smiled, and he hoped that he was a little bit her type, too. He had no way of knowing, of course that he was as much her type as she was his; that, just as his dream-type was a tallish blonde with long legs and beautiful brown eyes and a cute little nose, her type was a tall, boyish, green-eyed redhead, which described him perfectly. Nor could he know that, though she had answered him partially out of politeness, she also had a much stronger reason for answering: a sudden desire to talk to someone who looked nice to her, as he did, after her ugly experience with those two boys in Central Park.
Tim stepped quickly over to her, encouraged and eager. "I guess we're neighbors," he said. "My name's Tim Halloran."
"I guess we are," the girl said. "I'm Liz Lawrence."
They stood there in silence for a moment, suddenly awkward. Liz said, "Well... " and turned again toward her door, Tim moved a little forward, suddenly and desperately anxious not to let her move out of his life again, even for that night.
"Look," he said, "please don't think I'm being fresh or anything, but it gets awfully lonely in New York for a guy from out of town. Would you -- would you like to go downstairs and have a drink at the bar with me?"
She turned toward him to look at him again, and her brown eyes were suddenly very solemn. "It's the same for a girl from out of town," she said. "I'd like very much to have a drink with you."
They went down together to the hotel bar, but it was crowded and they decided to go down the street to a nice little cocktail lounge they had both noticed but had never before visited. It turned out to be even prettier on the inside than on the outside -- wallpapered and softly-lit and very quiet. They found a little table off in a corner; and they sat down at it and ordered two Tom Collins.
To their mutual surprise, they began to talk as flowingly and as eagerly as if they'd known each other for years instead of for just a matter of minutes. Before they'd finished their second Collins apiece, they were comparing what seemed to be every year of their young lives, comparing Croydon, Pennsylvania with Liz's home town of Marsh City, Kansas, telling each other about family and friends and their reaction to New York.
The conversation broke down only when Tim absent-mindedly put his hand over Liz's. He didn't mean it even the beginnings of a pass, but did it only because they'd been talking so animatedly that it felt as though they'd been friends forever. But, to his amazement, Liz pulled her hand away sharply, and he saw her face grow suddenly dead-white and tears start in her big eyes.
He stared at her, and then he said, stumblingly, "I'm... sorry, Liz. I swear, I didn't mean anything by it. We were just talking, and I felt like I'd known you all my life, and I just... "
"It's not your fault," Liz said. "I can't --" And then she could hold the tears back no longer, and leaned against him and began to cry deeply and bitterly, and he put his arms around her and held her awkwardly and patted her back and waited for the tears to stop. He was conscious of the fact that the bartender and some of the other patrons were staring at them, but he didn't give a damn about that; all he felt was incredibly sharp pain at the girl's tears.
When she'd finished crying, she told him, haltingly and without looking at him, what had happened to her in the park. He felt his blood boiling as he heard it, growing more and more furious, and the tears disappeared and she even smiled a little when he stood up and said he was going to go over to the park and look for the two guys she'd described, because it was obvious that he meant it. She pulled him down next to her again and told him not to be silly; that was all over and the only intelligent thing to try to do about it was forget it. And when he persisted, she stunned him by telling him bluntly that it was as much her fault as the boys'.
"I don't understand what you mean," Tim said.
That was when, forcing herself to look right into his clear green eyes, she told him why she had gone into Central Park in the first place. She was a little amazed with herself at being able to come right out with it, because she had never expected to be able to discuss her impulse with anybody -- anybody at all, as long as she lived. And yet, in a curious and contradictory way, another part of her was not really so terribly surprised at all, because even then she sensed somehow that this was a boy to whom she would be able to tell the truth without embarrassment for the rest of her life.
He did not respond for quite a while after she had told him about the urges and the hungers which had driven her to the Park to try to get herself a man. And then, when he finally did speak, he did not talk about her at all; he simply told her, in a quiet and matter-of-fact voice, of the way he had been driven to go into that bar and buy himself a woman, and of the way he had hurried to go to bed with the fat hooker, despite his immediate feeling of revulsion toward her. And Liz understood the parallel, even though he did not put it into exact words; she realized that he felt only sympathy and understanding, rather than contempt for her, because he, too, had been forced by his hungers to do something which was essentially not natural and normal to him.
And she knew, then, what was coming next, so she felt and showed no surprise when he said, very gently. "Let's go back to the hotel, Liz. Let's go to my room--- or yours." And she answered, in a voice as quiet as his, "It doesn't matter which," and he paid the bill and they stood up and left the bar.
They went to Tim's room because it was closer to the elevator, and, as naturally and simply as if they were an old married couple and had been performing the ritual of lovemaking for years, their arms went around each other and they kissed the moment the door had closed behind them. Then Tim found the zipper of Liz's dress and pulled it all the way down, and the dress slipped off her slim body and fell onto the floor.
She stood there before him completely unembarrassed in her brassiere and half-slip and pants and shoes and stockings, and they kissed again and he opened the catch of her brassiere. The brassiere fell away from her body, and the first thought which came to him was the contrast between this girl's young loveliness and the gross bulk of the woman who had come to him in the bar. The difference was staggering: the hooker had been truly ugly, whereas Liz was beautiful in every inch and every line of her. There was beauty in her shining blonde hair and in her so-serious brown eyes and in her delicate face; and now that her body was bare to the waist, there was special beauty in her full, firm, up-curved young breasts, in the pure whiteness of her skin and the deep red of her long nipples.
Then she kicked off her shoes and he took off the rest of her clothes. His quick breathing increased as the beauty of the rest of her was confirmed before his eye.
Her belly was very smooth and flat, not an ounce of excess weight on it, and her legs, very long-looking even when she was dressed, looked even longer and more beautifully-shaped in her nakedness. And the area where her legs met, soft and shadowed and inviting, seemed to him the most beautiful of all.
He never remembered, afterward, taking off his clothes, but obviously he did get them off, and very fast. And when he, too, was completely naked, he lifted her in his arms and carried her over to the bed. He set her down on the cool white sheets and put his body down on hers.
They did not bother with preliminaries that first time, because they were too desperate for each other and because they both knew that this would be only the first of hundreds of times throughout their lives. All they did was kiss and join their tongues together inside Liz's mouth, and then Liz had put her arms around Tim, her eager hands on his strong back, and Tim had put his arms around Liz, his hands on her soft buttocks; then he plunged forward and took her.
For both of them, this was truly the first time of their lives -- not those earlier experiences in Central Park and in that scabby little hotel. This time their lovemaking was accompanied by true warmth for, and true enjoyment of, the person whose body each had joined, and it seemed to both of them that they had finally found what each sought as their bodies plunged and twisted together and finally tensed to completion.
* * *
"What makes you think," Dr. Scott Carrington asked Jane Matthews, "that your condition is strictly mental?"
"What else can it be?" Jane said bitterly, her face twisted with grief and her nervous fingers upsetting her dark-haired upsweep. "What else can it be but an ugly mental aberration -- this thing which suddenly hits inside me and make me run screaming for relief from a man, any man...?"
"It can also," Carrington said quietly, "be completely physical."
Jane's beautiful wide eyes looked up at him in bewilderment. "I don't understand how," she said.
"It's very simple," Carrington told her, "and it's the explanation for better than half of the so-called nymphomania cases that doctors run into. These overwhelming urges of yours may be caused by nothing more than an irritant factor which suddenly becomes activated in your body."
Jane shook her dark head. "I'm still confused." she said. "Perhaps if -- "
"I'll try to make it simpler," Carrington said. "You know what aphrodisiacs are, don't you -- drugs which stimulate people sexually? Things like cantharides, Spanish fly?"
Jane nodded.
"Well," Carrington said, "the principle which makes those drugs work is that they irritate the sexual regions -- they irritate the sexual areas and thereby bring on sexual impulses and the desire for quick relief. It's not as simple as all that, of course, or every drugstore would have the stuff on sale for husbands to use on frigid wives and vice versa; the drugs are outlawed because an excessive dose will cause irritation far beyond sexual stimulation -- it can cause incredible pain and injury to the body or even death. But you see the general principle, don't you?"
"I think so," Jane said.
"Well," Carrington said, "something of the same sort may have been driving you all these years -- except that it's being brought about by what might be called natural reasons. That is, not by drugs or anything like that, but something like a structural peculiarity inside your body which causes the irritation to act up from time to time and without warning."
There was sudden hope in Jane's eyes, and then it died, and she said, "But that isn't possible! My parents took me to a doctor when I was just a kid, when this -- this thing first started to show up. And he told them in so many words that some girls are just -- born-over-sexual-tramps, and nothing can be done about it."
Carrington frowned, anger on his handsome face which she knew was not directed at her. "Don't hold me responsible for the opinion of a man who sounds as though he should have been flunked out in his first year of medical school," he said. "AD I can do is express contempt for a diagnosis like that. Your type of condition can be cured whether it turns out to be physical or mental -- all we have to do is find out which it is." He put a gentle hand on her slim shoulder. "Look," he said, "you want to find out and get rid of this thing, don't you?"
"Of course I do," she said.
"All right, then," Carrington said. "I have a close friend who's a gynecologist, a really first-rate doctor who was a classmate of mine at medical school. His office is just a couple of blocks from here. Supposing I call him up right now and --"
"No!" Jane said sharply.
Carrington stared at her. "Come again?" be said.
"No!" Jane said again. "It almost killed me to get myself to come here to see you it took all the strength and nerve and courage I have left. I don't want to have to face another doctor. I want you to examine me and find out."
"I've already told you," Carrington said patiently, "that I'm not a general practitioner. I'm a psychiatrist."
"But a psychiatrist is an M. D., too, isn't that right?" Jane said. "You've had the same general medical training as your gynecologist-friend, haven't you?"
Carrington sighed. "Yes," he said, finally, "but you don't understand. All my medical training was just preliminary as far as I was concerned -- just a necessary evil to get over with, so I could specialize in psychiatry. I haven't concerned myself with or given a thought to physical conditions in years. And I'm not even permitted to undertake something of this sort now that I'm a diplomate in psychiatry."
"You're the one who doesn't understand," Jane said. "I swear to you that I'll kill myself if you -- if you don't cure me of this thing, and if that isn't an admission of a mental condition, I don't know what is. You're sworn to try to cure any patient who comes to you, and if it's necessary to retreat back to general practice to accomplish it, it's something you've got to do."
Carrington looked at her for a long while in silence, and then he shook his head slowly, a near-smile on his lips. Then he said, "All right. Okay. I won't attempt to show you the seventeen different flaws in your reasoning. Let's just say I'll bow to the whim of a beautiful and troubled woman, and let's hope it doesn't cost me my license." His voice became suddenly sharp, businesslike. "And let's get on with it. Take off your clothes -- all of them -- bare to the skin. Then go into that room on the left there and lie down on the examination table."
She began to undress quickly, suddenly very conscious of her femininity, a faint flush beginning to appear on her skin. The flush grew as she removed her dress and slip and lifted off her brassiere, revealing her lush, high-pointed, quivering breasts, and deepened again as she stepped out of her pants and stood there with her slim legs a little apart and her buttocks swaying a little despite herself and the inturned area where her legs met already beginning to quiver and tingle with desire. But Carrington regarded her absolutely impersonally and almost absent-mindedly, and after a moment he turned and disappeared into a small room on the right.
She went into the room he'd indicated and lay down on the examining table, and as she lay there she heard faintly the sounds of his movements, the sound of water running and metallic clinking as, presumably, he sterilized instruments preparatory to use on her. He was gone a very long time. And as she waited, she began to picture him in her mind, very good-looking and clean-cut and much younger than she'd imagined he would be before she'd seen him. And suddenly, lying there naked on the table, she felt wild hunger beginning to build in her again; and, though she was sick with shame at it, she began to writhe on the table and she put one hand on her breast and began to squeeze it, and she put her other hand between her legs and began to rub herself with increasing frenzy.
She was almost wild when Carrington finally came into the room, silently and suddenly, and she barely had time to pull her hands away from herself. She didn't know whether or not he'd seen what she had been doing, though she could not imagine how he could have missed it; but he gave no sign of having seen anything at all. He simply walked over to her and said, his voice as unemotional and doctorlike as before, "Move your legs all the way apart, please, and then lie as still as possible."
She moved her legs apart and then shut her eyes tight, because the sight of his young and handsome masculinity was agony to her, but she could not keep her body from trembling as he began to examine her. She felt his hands touch her breasts and then her chest and belly, squeezing lightly and probing, and then a moan escaped her lips as he touched her and began to examine her with his hands and with instruments.
He did not comment on the sound; he said nothing at all except to say once, grumblingly. "You're a fool to insist that I make this examination. I feel as though I'm back in my internship -- trying to remember some of the things my professors kept pounding into my head."
He continued to examine her gently and skillfully, touching her and prodding at her with his fingers and instruments, and it was as though she was on fire now, and she no longer made even the attempt to hide her emotions. She twisted and turned on the examining table, her beautiful breasts rising and falling rapidly, her face rose-flushed and her pink little tongue emerging to touch and moisten her lips.
Then she felt him move away from her. and she heard him say, "You can open your eyes now. it's all over."
She opened her eyes and looked at him. And when he remained silent, she said, "Did you find anything? Or -- or was my family doctor right?"
"Your family doctor was probably a destructive and vicious old fool," he said. "I'll remind you again that I'm not an expert in the field by any means, but it seems quite evident to me that there's a definite foreign formation in there, an unnatural tissue which can definitely be causing the irritation and resultant excessive sexual stimulation I described to you." He put his hands apart. "Make sure you understand this," he said. "This isn't anything definite. There are going to have to be tests and x-rays and things of that sort, and you're going to have to get those from my friend whether you like it or not. All I want to say now is that the signs are definitely favorable."
"And if you turn out to be right?" Jane asked.
"If I turn out to be right," Carrington said, "all that's involved is a simple and relatively minor operation. And after that, you'll find yourself completely able to say 'Yes' or 'No' to your men-friends strictly according to your mood of the moment." He grinned at her, suddenly, and said, "My friend's name is Turner. I'm sure he's gone home by now like a sensible man, but I'll make an appointment for you first thing tomorrow morning, I'll come along with you if it'll make you feel any better."
Sudden tears appeared in Jane's eyes. She said, her voice very low, "I don't know what to say, Dr. Carrington."
"Don't say anything," Carrington said. "Just get dressed now and let me go home -- as I was about to do when you popped unannounced into my office."
Jane looked at him for a long time in silence, and for the first time she realized that he was looking back at her without his doctor's pose, without his careful impersonal air; he was looking at her pale slimness and at the full curve of her red-tipped breasts. And she said, very softly, "Not yet, Doctor."
"You've lost me again," Carrington said, but his eyes did not move from her body.
"I'm not cured yet," Jane said. And she put out her arms to him.
Carrington seemed to strain suddenly toward her, her, and then he turned away. He said, hoarsely, "You ought to know better. I can't do that... "
"You've got to," Jane said, and now her hunger was evident in her voice. Her body was trembling, and her eyes were hot and shiny as though with fever, and she got off the table and stepped up to him. "Mrs. Carrington," she said shakily, "will just have to forgive your infidelity this time. She'll have to understand that a doctor has to do some funny things to -- to relieve his patients."
"There doesn't happen to be a Mrs. Carrington." he said. "But there are certain rules in this profession -- certain ethical standards -- "
"The hell with your ethical standards," she said softly, and she put her hands on his face and turned him toward her and put her mouth against his. And his arms moved around her and crushed her naked slimness hard against him.
He took her into another room of his suite, then, and then he took off his clothes. There was a big, wide couch in the room, usually used for far more routine purposes connected with his practice, and he tried to place her down upon it. But she shook her head and made him lie down on it instead.
And then she began to make love to him with her lips and with her body.
She lay down on top of him, letting him feel the softness of her breasts against his chest and the caress of her middle against his, and now he was no longer a cool, clinical doctor at all. He was a man who hungered for the woman whose body lay against his, and he put his mouth against her neck and bit gently into her flesh, and his hands slid along her back and then held and squeezed her buttocks.
She lay there over him that way for a few moments, moving her body so that her breasts slid along his skin, and she stroked his close-cut dark hair and kissed his forehead and the bridge of his nose and his mouth. Then she moved downward, her buttocks high in the air as he continued to caress and squeeze them, and she kissed his neck and his chest.
Then she paused at his flat breasts, taking each nipple in her mouth in turn and biting lightly at it. He moved one hand between her buttocks as she did this, his other hand between their bodies to take hold of her right breast and squeeze and shake it roughly, and the movement created such excitement in her that she bit suddenly and deeply into his nipple.
Then she moved down again, and he lifted his body eagerly to welcome her as she began to kiss him, moving from side to side as she made love to him. He plunged his fingers deep into her upswept hairdo, loosening it and causing it to fall softly around her face, and then he again reached for her breasts and held both of them and squeezed her long nipples and rubbed the white Bounds together.
He let her make love to him for a long time. And then he caught hold of her and turned her so that she was under him and lying on the couch, and he moved his own body so that her middle was directly against his and wriggling and crushing against him.
They went wild together; their hands slid over each other and tore at each other, and their middles jounced with crushing force. And as they gasped together their bodies joined and creating overwhelming pleasure in each other, they completed simultaneously.
They lay together quietly for a long time after that, and Jane was relaxed again, as she always was afterward; but this time her contentment was far more deep-seated and completed. Lying there in Scott Carrington's arms, she felt absolutely certain that he was right in his diagnosis, and that his friend's tests and x-rays would bear out his diagnosis and she'd soon be operated on and cured. And then -- how wonderful it was to consider and imagine -- lovemaking would no longer be a compulsive necessity, but something warm and wonderful which she could accept by choice.
She sighed deeply and suddenly, and Carrington leaned over and kissed her long-lashed eyes and her straight little nose. She returned the kiss, kissing his lean, handsome face, and a faint smile appeared on her lips as a thought struck her. He had said another wonderful thing after his examination, in addition to his statement that he thought she could be cured;: he'd said there was no Mrs. Carrington. And she thought: Weil, not yet, anyway.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Emily Norris remained unmoving near her husband's body for a long time before she touched him. Finally, she shut her mouth on his middle, very lightly and tentatively, but she pulled her face away at once when he stirred in his sleep.
She did not try again for quite a while after that; she sat down on the carpeted floor alongside him, and she put her beautiful face close to his sleeping body again, but she continued to keep a distance of several inches between them. And when, at last, she did touch him once more, it was with her hand rather than with her mouth, and it was a touch as light as the fluttering landing of a butterfly.
Despite the lightness, Kenny stirred again, but this time she did not move away. She held her hand, soft and caressing, on his interesting, exciting middle, and when he settled back into sleep, she began to move her hand exploringly, across his belly and around his middle and then down into the deep crevice between his buttocks. The sensation of his body against her questing hand began to build heat in her, and she found herself breathing more and more rapidly as she moved her band over and over him again and then began to caress him.
Then she brought her face back against his middle, resting her soft cheek against him at first, and then turning and putting her mouth gently against his body. He did not move, and she opened her lips a little and kissed him lightly. To her surprise, the sensation and the reaction within her was not the horror she had expected, and which had caused her to run out of the room the previous night; it was, in fact, strangely pleasant and stimulating. She kissed him again, and the heat surged and increased within her, and then she tightened the grip of her hand on his middle and began to make love to him with her mouth with abandoned and awakened passion.
He awoke suddenly; she knew it the moment it happened from the abrupt stiffening of his body, and then it was confirmed by the sound of the sharp intake of his breath as he reacted in surprise. For a moment he seemed frozen with surprise, and then, very slowly, almost as though he found it too good to believe, his hands moved out to stroke her soft dark hair.
She felt completely unashamed of her heat now, and her lovely head bobbed frantically as she caressed and kissed and tasted him with her soft mouth and with her tongue. And as his fingers became entangled in her hair and he tightened his grip on her, he began to move his body, twisting and churning his buttocks and bucking up and down against her. He was gasping for breath in his heat, and moaning with excitement, and the sounds increased her own excitement and made her lovemaking more and more rapid and frantic.
Then, suddenly, he moved wildly and caught hold of her body and lifted her onto the bed and to him, so that they lay foot-to-head against each other, and he put his eager mouth against her middle. For an instant, she stiffened in instinctive recoil, because she had heard that this, too, was "not nice." But the inexplicable thing was that it felt very, very nice indeed, and, as his lips moved against her and to her, she responded wildly and forgot her hesitation completely.
And then, at last, Kenny moved away from his wife, and instantly she responded by slipping off him and lying down next to him. He moved above her at once, and they looked at each other for a long moment, their eyes bright with passion and love. And then, as her arms and legs tightened around him, he moved very slowly and gently at first, and then with sudden, sharp, tearing strength. She cried aloud once, so much anguish in the sound that he stared at her in fear, but then the pain was gone and he was completely with her, and she smiled up at him. And after that, they moved and crushed together in pleasure and delight until they reached fulfillment.
They did not sleep at all that night; they took each other over and over again, each time their strength returned. And, though they were really very sensible and mature for their age and realized that other troubles might come to plague them throughout their married life, they knew when morning arrived that they would never again be troubled by problems which arose out of love.
* * *
Vic Zachary and Reggie Graham were hardly aware of what was happening on the stage during the first act of the play they were attending. They held hands without letting go for a minute through the full hour and fifteen minutes, and their hands grew moist with perspiration as their legs continued to rub and press together. And when the curtain fell and the audience began to move out into the lobby and the street to smoke, they had had enough.
They walked out into the street with the rest of the audience, but, instead of stopping outside the theatre, they continued to walk along the street until they had reached Eighth Avenue. And at the corner of Eighth, they stopped and looked at each other in breathless silence, and then Vic said, very quietly. "I want to take you to bed, Reggie."
"I know," Reggie said. "I want you, too."
There was a big, bright, shiny hotel down the block on Eighth Avenue, and they went to it and registered as Mr. and Mrs. Vic Zachary. It turned out to be much easier than they'd supposed. They had no luggage, of course, and it seemed to both of them that their guilt showed on their faces, but the room clerk hardly looked at them, and the only deviation from the norm and the usual was that he asked for the rent, fourteen dollars, in advance. And a few minutes later they were inside the room and in each others' arms.
They sat on the bed fully clothed and kissed for a long time before Vic, awkward as a schoolboy stunned over his first conquest, began to fumble with Reggie's clothes. He searched both sides of her dress before he seemed to realize that her zipper was on the back of her dress, and then he caught a bit of cloth in the zipper's teeth and had to struggle over it for a moment or two before he got it free.
But, he finally got the zipper down and her dress off, and the look of her as she sat there in her slip and bra and panties, so fragile and petite in sharp contrast to his wife Grace's relative bigness, made him suddenly wild with heat. He put his arms around her and moved her down against the bed, and he kissed her fiercely and bruisingly, his body moving a little as he lay against her, and he continued to kiss her for a long time before he began to undress her further.
He resumed undressing her, finally, lifting her slip over her head and tossing it onto a nearby chair, and then he opened and removed her brassiere. Her breasts showed naked and red-tipped before his hungry eyes, and he stared at them for a long time without moving. They weren't really big compared to Grace's, much smaller, really, but it seemed to him they were much more beautiful in their delicate, firm, upcurved high-pointedness. Almost shyly, he reached out after a while to cup one in his hand; and then, as Reggie gasped at his touch, he leaned forward and took the breast into his mouth.
He sucked at it and nibbled lightly at it for a while, biting gently at the soft skin and flesh and at her hardening red nipple. And then he released it, and bent lower and pulled her pants down her legs and off.
She was waiting for him now, desperate for him; he could see that in the hot look of her eyes and the trembling of her body. And very quickly, he began to take off his own clothes, slipping off his suit-coat and taking off his shoes and socks and tie and shirt and undershirt and trousers and shorts. And then their naked bodies touched and tingled together, and Reggie's slim legs moved into the air and Vic plunged down to meet her.
There was no sensible or logical or realistic explanation for it, but it seemed to both of them, as their bodies blended and merged, that the sensation they felt was stronger and wilder and more wonderful than anything they had ever felt before in their lives. It was more wonderful, it seemed to them, than the sensations their marital partners had brought to them throughout their years together, even those they'd felt at the very beginning, even during their honeymoons; and it wasn't just that the others were the legitimate consummations of marriage and this was illicit and stolen, because the sensation was far stronger to Reggie than even the pleasurable interval she had had with that door-to-door salesman. But nothing before, nothing at all, had been like this: this wild, animal passion which swept them as their bodies crushed together and moved apart and plunged together again.
The romantic, dewy-eyed thought which came to both of them was that they were, somehow, made for each other, built for each other, from the start -- and perhaps that was the answer. Or perhaps it was something far more prosaic: the old truth that stolen fruit is always sweetest, and this theft was sweetest of all because it also carried with it the excitingly guilt-loaded added fact, that the husband and wife from whom Reggie and Vic had stolen each other happened to be then-close friends. But they didn't stop to think about it for long: waves of overpowering passion like rough seas swept over them as they held each other and moved wildly in the rhythm of love, and they soon thought of nothing else but the pleasure of their movements.
And then, abruptly, their bodies tensed, and their mouths clung together and their hands tore at each other as they strained into the spasms of completion They took each other again, after a quick cigarette, and it was only when the second period of lovemaking was over that they thought to look at their watches. It was nearly two o'clock in the morning before they got back to the Madison-Plaza.
* * *
Bill Graham and Grace Zachary touched hands and legs together, too, as they sat quietly in the little bar on East 45th Street, and after a while their mouths began to brush and hold together with increasing frequency. Heat and excitement of a type and strength which neither of them had felt in a long time begun to take hold of them, and their bodies strained closer together in their seats.
And then the spell was broken abruptly as Grace looked at her watch and stood up with a start. "We've got to go!" she said.
"No yet," Bin said pleadingly, and pulled her down on the seat again. "Please!"
"We've got to," Grace said, but she paused to touch Bill's mouth clingingly with hers before she spoke again. Then she said, "I mean it, Bill. Vic may have had no luck in getting a ticket for tonight, and he may have been back at the hotel for hours and getting worried enough about me to start thinking about calling the police. And that applies to Reggie, too." She trembled as Bill's lips brushed her throat, but then she pushed gently away. "Listen to me, Bill -- we've got to go, really. Even if they both did get tickets, they'll be out any minute now and heading back to the Madison-Plaza. It's almost eleven o'clock . .
Bill moved his mouth away from her slim throat, and he looked deeply into her eyes for a minute. And then he said, clearly and distinctly, "We're not going right back to the Madison-Plaza, Grace. I'm going to take you first to someplace where -- where we can have each other... " She stared at him, her red lips apart. "You can't be serious," she said.
"I've never been more serious in my life," he said.
She continued to stare at him, and then, almost sadly, she shook her head and sighed. "I won't pretend to behave like a shocked teen-age girl, Bill," she said. "I'm old enough to come right out and admit that I want to go to bed with you -- deeply and desperately. But it's just impossible. We've got to think about Vic and Reggie... "
He stood up suddenly and looked down at her, and then he pulled her roughly to her feet. "I'll tell you what I think about them," he said, and his face was tense and determined and he no longer looked quite so scholarly. "I think the hell with them -- the hell with both of them." And he threw several bills on the table and moved Grace out of the bar.
They walked quickly to the corner of Madison Avenue and turned, and Grace continued to protest, but her protests grew weaker and weaker. "This is crazy," she said, as Bill propelled her gently through the doorway of a Madison Avenue hotel.
"You bet it's crazy," Bill said. "It's crazy as hell. I'll have us registered in a couple of minutes."
* * *
Their clothes were off within minutes after they entered the room, and they made love to each other with an imaginativeness which both had lacked in their recent relationships at home They turned on the radio, very low, as soon as their clothes were off, and they turned off all the lights except the tiny bathroom night-light, and they danced together in the near darkness. They danced with their bodies pressed tightly together, Bill's arms around Grace's slim waist and her arms around his neck, and his middle prodded her and her breasts crushed against his chest as they moved. And as they danced, he compared her with Reggie and was heated and made more passionate at what he considered her far superior features, her big, full breasts and her hips so wide below her small waist, and her soft, swaying buttocks, all as compared to Reggie's tininess. And Grace compared him favorably to her husband, too, admiring his sensitivity and slimness far above Vic's athletic huskiness.
After a while, they stopped dancing, and Bill turned her so that her back was toward him, and he moved her so that she stopped at a low-backed easy chair and bent over it. He moved forward sharply to press his middle against her big, soft buttocks for a moment, and then he put his hands underneath her buttocks and pulled her legs apart, and he entered her that way.
The reaction in Grace was immediate and overwhelming. Vic had never made love to her in that manner, and the sensation all through her body seemed to her to be the most exciting she had ever felt in her life. She braced herself on the chair and began to move her buttocks, writhing and wriggling them, and Bill bent more tightly over her and took her big breasts in his hands and began to move up and back against her. And it seemed to him, too, as Grace's body shook and rubbed against him, that this woman was the most exciting he'd ever known, far more exciting than any of the women he'd had before he'd married Reggie, and far more exciting than the one other woman he'd had since he'd married Reggie, and far more exciting than Reggie herself.
Then he stopped after a while and led Grace into the bathroom, and again he introduced her to something she had not tried before. He turned on the shower, and they both stepped under it; and, with the warm water tingling down sharply on them, he lifted her into his arms and entered her in standing position. And though she was so big as compared to his wife, he held her aloft with ease as he plunged back and forth.
And then, finally, they left the shower and he dried her body with a big bath towel, making her tremble as he touched every inch of her body; and he took her over to the big, inviting bed in the center of the room. And as she lay down and looked up at him, her clear-skinned body soft and inviting, he moved down swiftly and took her.
And this time, he did not change position again. Her legs locked around the small of his back and her arms moved tightly around his neck, and his own hands clutched and held her, and they twisted and lunged together with uninhibited fierceness and wild sounds of pleasure until they finally collapsed side by side.
They made love again before they left the hotel at Madison and Forty-Fifth. And after that, they walked very slowly, their arms around each other, back to the Madison-Plaza, and reached there at almost two o'clock.
* * *
Vic and Reggie entered a Madison-Plaza elevator and started upstairs a quarter-minute before Bill and Grace entered the elevator next to it and started upstairs, but the first elevator moved just a shade more slowly than the second. And both elevators stopped at the third floor and opened and let out their passengers at the very same moment.
The two men and the two women stopped dead and staring at each other, no one saying a word or even seeming to breathe, and the silence in the deserted hallway was deafening. All four of them remained frozen in their positions, Vic's hand clutching Reggie's hand tightly, and Bill's arm around Grace's waist and holding her tightly against his side.
It seemed apparent, in that frozen moment, that all four of them knew exactly what had happened and what was still happening, even though none of them had spoken at all. It was obvious in the way they stared at each other in shock and realization and open guilt, and in the way the two men held tightly onto their newfound partners. And still they remained there, as the seconds ticked by, without speaking.
And then, still silently but slowly and deliberately and meaningfully, Bill Graham turned and, his arm around Grace Zachary's waist and propelling her along with him, walked to his own room, 308, and opened it with his key. And then he half-pushed Grace into it and stepped in after her, and then the door closed behind them.
Vic Zachary and Reggie Graham remained there in the hallway for just a moment longer, and then they walked into the Zacharys' room, 307, and closed the door behind them. And after a while, the lights flicked off in both rooms.
Both couples made love again that night, even though there was no real contentment and ease within them any longer because all of them knew that there would be problems and decisions to be faced the next morning. But for that night, at least, they bad managed to vanquish the monster which had been tearing away viciously at all four of them: boredom.
* * *
The moment the tall, thin man put his hand over her mouth and began to drag her into the dirty alleyway, Connie Franklin sensed that she would gain nothing by fighting and struggling, but she fought and struggled anyway. It was an instinctive reaction: she had always, she realized with sudden clarity, hated sex even when it was an expected part of the deal and bargain she had made with each man she married, and it horrified and sickened her that she would have to submit now to the same thing with a marauding, faceless stranger.
She tried to twist her slim body out of the man's grasp, but his grip was too strong; she couldn't even move in his arms, and he was pulling her down slowly and inexorably onto a pile of rags or rubbish. And suddenly, she tried something else: she managed to get her mouth a little open, and she bit savagely and sharply down on his fingers.
He cried out in pain, and, even in the darkness, she could see a sudden smear of blood on his fingers as he pulled his hand away. For an instant, she stared at the blood in a kind of sick fascination, because she had never caused injury in anyone before in her life, but then she recovered and opened her mouth to scream. She was too late; she had hesitated only for a second or two, but it was too long. As she opened her mouth, the man lunged forward, and his fist crashed brutally and jarringly against her mouth and nose.
There were sudden flashes of red and black in front of her, and she fell back, clawing to maintain her balance bat failing, back against the piled heap on the ground. And then the man lashed out and hit her again, very hard, and there was the bitter taste of blood in her mouth and she did not try to fight him any longer.
Dimly, she felt the man's thin, hard body crush down against here, and then she felt her dress being lifted over her beautiful legs and her hips and her breasts and her face. Then her brassiere was opened and pulled away from her, too, and finally she felt her half-slip and her pants being torn away from her body.
And then the man had pulled her legs apart, and she gasped as he plunged downward and took her.
Almost immediately, he caught hold of her buttocks and forced himself even closer to her and began to move his body -- and for an instant she remained rigid with shock. But incredibly, unbelievably, the shock was not because of what was happening to her -- it was because, to her own absolute amazement, she found herself liking it.
It just didn't seem possible, because love had always been such a bore and an annoyance to her in the past, and those times had always been with men with whom she'd always believed she had a deep and sincere affinity, at least during the earlier days of each marriage. And still there was no doubt about it; this was strangely better, this was actually enjoyable. The thought didn't seem to make sense when it first came to her mind; and yet, despite her astonishment and despite her dazedness at the beating the man had given her, she also seemed to know at once, almost instinctively, why it was so. It was because this joining of a man's body with her own had none of the fawning reverence her husbands had displayed, every goddamned one of them, each time they took her into their arms.
For that had been the trouble without question, she knew suddenly: they had continued to treat her like a goddess even at those moments when a woman ought to be treated like a tramp. They had begged it from her when the real way to create heat and passion m her, when the real way to have made her enjoy it, was to take it from her. But there had never been anything like that in her life, not even once: instead of savage manliness, she had always gotten soft gentlemanliness.
Well, there was nothing gentlemanly about this one, this -- this rapist. He was brutal and he was ugly and he was animalistic: and, incredibly, she found that she loved it. And as the man moved more and more sharply against her and within her, she put her arms and legs suddenly around him and began to twist and writhe in rhythm with him.
After that, it was a toss-up as to which of them was the more savage and animalistic. Joe York had attacked a frightened and frigid woman and had forced her to lie naked under him and submit herself to him, and he had turned her into a tigress by doing it, his violence changing her into an inflamed woman who hungered more for him now than he had for her. As they moved, her hands began to scratch wildly along his back, tearing into the skin and flesh and causing the blood to flow, and her mouth moved along his neck and her teeth bit deeply into him.
It increased the excitement in him, too. The experience of watching a horrified victim turn into a willing partner was not at all new to him, of course, because many of the women he had attacked had fought him at first and then joined him completely after he had taken them and begun to plunge against them, but this was different -- this was more than that. For the first time, he had come up against a woman who seemed to have the same offbeat requirement he had had for so long: the need for tearing, ravaging violence in love-making. It was obvious in the way she ripped and scratched and bit at him, far more wildly and violently than the mild manifestations of this sort of thing in ordinary love-play. She was doing far more that biting and scratching him, actually -- she was attacking him as he had attacked her a few minutes before.
And so, for long minutes in the cluttered darkness of the alleyway, they both became less than human as they writhed and twisted and fought and tore at each other, full of love and hunger for each other as they forgot how it had all started and forgot everything else in the world. They were both bruised and torn and writhing in pain, and yet it was the most wonderful experience both of them had ever had as they held crushingly together and finally tensed together into rigid completion.
They did not move apart for fully a minute after that, and then slowly, reluctantly, York pulled himself away from the blonde girl on the ground and stood up. He had an established pattern once his attacks were over: he always adjusted his clothing and took off at full speedy because many of the women began to scream for help again after he was finished, even if they'd begun to join in with him while his lovemaking had been going on. But, he did not do so immediately this time: he looked down at Connie with a look almost of wistfulness and love on his face, and it seemed to him that she was looking up at him in the same way.
But then logic and reason took over in his mind, because he was really a sensible and clear-thinking man at those moments when his hunger did not have a grip on him. And he realized two things: that he was not a man destined for love in the usual sense of the word, for settling down with one woman no matter how much she seemed to be like him in her need for violence; and second, that it was just insane to consider for even a moment that a good and lasting relationship could ever come from something which had begun the way this one had begun. And, still very reluctantly, he moved toward the mouth of the alleyway, still looking at Connie, and then he began to run like a hunted animal away from her down the empty street.
It seemed to him, as he ran, that he heard her call out faintly to him, but he doubted his own ears, and did not stop; and he could not have gotten confirmation of this from Connie even if she had been asked, because she bad cried out, "Wait!", but the word was so instinctive that she was not even completely aware that she'd said it. And as the man's footsteps disappeared into the distance and complete silence returned again, she fell back into shock at the experience and was not even sure, after a moment, that she had reacted to the rape as hungrily and willingly as she had. And after another moment, she stood up and began to fumble for her clothes in the darkness, and she put on her torn underwear and her dress and then she, too, left the alleyway.
That should have been the end of it; the first and last meeting of two people who had met in wild violence and then moved apart to be separated by the multi-millions who live in New York City. But there was the fact that, though neither of them knew it, they lived in the same hotel, on the same floor, and right next door to each other.
And it was to the Madison-Plaza that both of them headed after that. Connie walked down the dark street for two blocks, no longer interested in whether or not there was a gambling joint at the address she'd been given, and finally saw a cab and flagged it and took it to the hotel. And Joe York ran for fully five blocks before he saw another cab and hailed it, and he, too, gave the address of the Madison-Plaza.
The two of them arrived at the Madison-Plaza less than a minute apart.
CHAPTER NINE
Ann Wentworth did not go to work at all the next morning. She had come home to the Madison-Plaza very late and very tired the previous evening, and she asked the night-clerk to do her a great favor and have someone call her office at around nine o'clock and say she was ill with a virus, and then she went to bed and slept until almost noon. And when she finally awoke, she had a room-service breakfast sent up, and she spent the rest of the day lounging around in her pajamas and robe and thinking.
She had a lot to think about, and she didn't feel at all guilty at playing hookie for a day from the office. There hadn't been anything important on her desk which couldn't wait until Monday, and she just didn't feel like putting in a day of routine effort and having to wait until the evening and the week-end which followed to settle down and think out where her life would go from here. The experience she had had in the Village with Bert and those other two girls, Stevie and Cora, and the decision she had reached about herself in the course of it, were just too important and too far-reaching for her to put off for a later decision.
It wasn't that belated distaste or horror had begun to touch her at her knowledge that she was one of the different ones -- one of those women who would probably never marry and live a so-called normal life with a man, but would instead spend the rest of her life in affairs and relationship with others of her own sex and inclination. It wasn't that, not a bit; if anything, she felt more content than ever this next morning, now that she'd grown even more used to the idea that this was it -- and settled -- exclamation point. But, there were an awful lot of follow-up decisions to be reached.
She wondered as she lay there, slim and blonde and blue-eyed and lovely, if she would try to keep it a secret and have her woman-and-woman love affairs in secret, or would she cut out all pretense, at least after working-hours, the way Bert and those other two girls obviously did? And if the latter, would she remain at the Madison-Plaza, or would she get a little apartment in the Village somewhere and join in the daily -- or nightly -- life of all the other women there who were like her?
And that brought up another point. Her experience the previous evening had been wonderful and, in a strange way that women who were not like her could never understand, really quite beautiful; and she felt better than she'd ever felt before in her life, free and as though she'd been released from prison after a long term. But she had to admit one thing, now that she looked back at it in the cool light of the next day: she hadn't really found that fat Bert very attractive, and the other two hadn't really set her heart fluttering, either, though Cora had been sort of interesting. The fact, however, remained; it had been the experience which had overwhelmed her and given her pleasure rather than the people with whom she'd experienced it, and she'd have to be more selective in the future.
There was no reason why she shouldn't, she told herself, thoughtfully, as she considered it. The type of love she'd chosen for herself was something on which society in general frowned, and she'd have to learn to live with that; but, aside from that one inescapable fact, there was no reason that she had to be promiscuous about it. She could pick her partner or partners as carefully and in the same way as a -- she hesitated in her mind at the word -- normal girl picked her boy friends, confining herself to partners who attracted her specially. And there'd apparently be no difficulty in having a wide choice, judging by the amount of women like her in just that one Village place alone.
She thought about it all through the day, stopping around six to have a room service dinner. She was still thinking about it as the evening moved on. At eight-fifteen, she was suddenly startled by a knock on the door.
She went to the door and opened it, and felt color flooding her face when she saw that it was Pat Hale, her office friend who'd told her about Drop Inn.
Pat stood in the doorway looking at her for a moment, as chic and sophisticated and aware-looking as ever. And then she said, "You don't look very sick."
"I -- I'm feeling much better now," Ann said, falteringly. "It must have been one of those quick viruses which hits you suddenly and makes you sick as the devil and then disappears just the way it came."
"Uh huh," Pat said, and there was a curious note in her voice. "You had me so worried I thought I'd come up and have a look for myself instead of just phoning. You're the conscientious type who usually won't let pneumonia keep you away from the office."
She walked into the room and sat down on one of the big easy chairs, and then, as Arm took a chair opposite her, she turned and looked at her so probingly that Ann felt the color deepen in her cheeks. And suddenly she said, her voice low and clear, "I don't think you've been sick at all, Ann. You went to Drop Inn last night, didn't you? What happened to you there?"
Ann felt her heart lurch at the question, but she forced herself to look only mildly puzzled. "Happened to me?" she said, her eyebrows raised. "I went there, yes, but nothing happened to me at all. I stayed there about ten minutes and found the place sort of boring, so I left and came on home... " Pat pulled a cigarette out of a pack, and there was silence for a moment as she lit it. Then she said, "That's another he. Would it make it easier for you to tell me about it if I tell you that -- " She paused, a very long pause, and then she said, "If I tell you that I'm the same way, too?"
The statement was so shocking, so unexpected, that Ann stared at her, stunned, and she dropped careful guardedness completely. "You?" she said. "But -- but that's impossible. You're so -- so feminine... "
"What on earth does that prove?" Pat said, dryly. "Aren't you, Ann?" She shook her head. "You'll find there are more like us around than there are truck driver types." She was silent again for a moment, and then she said, very quietly, "There's no question about me, Ann. I've known about myself for a long, long time -- long enough to have built a rather pleasant life for myself. And I've known about you, though never for sure, for quite a long time, too -- from little things you let drop when you thought you were being guarded and careful.
It's true, isn't it, Ann?"
"It's true," Ann said softly. "But, if you've known so long, why didn't you -- well, approach me somehow?"
"Because I was never absolutely sure," Pat said. "And I just didn't have the nerve to... make a pass at you, and perhaps have you turn away from me in horror if I was wrong." She added, not looking at Ann now and her voice very low. "It wasn't that I didn't find you attractive... " The words rang strangely in Ann's ears, coming from this dark-haired girl she'd thought she knew so well, but even as it did she felt her heart begin to pound and her breath quicken. Because she suddenly realized that, unlike Bert and Stevie and even Cora, here was a girl who did interest her completely -- whom she, too, as Pat had said about her, found attractive.
She stood up, suddenly, and walked over to Pat's chair and sat down on an arm, and, with a courage she'd never before known she possessed, she put one hand on the dark-haired girl's shoulder and the other, lightly and caressingly, on Pat's beautiful face. And she said, "Well, you know for sure now, Pat" Their mouths met and their arms moved around each other, and a few moments later they took off their clothes and moved together to the bed. And before that evening had ended, they had both decided, because Pat had had a number of affairs but nothing permanent, to move down to the Village and take a Utile apartment together, both of them confident that they had begun a new and happier life.
It was not, they knew, going to be easy; it was, in fact, going to be extremely difficult, showing their true faces to the world and telling the world it could go to bell if it didn't like it. But the feeling of warmth and love which grew up between them that evening made it all worthwhile, and they both knew somehow, knew positively, that everything would work out right for them.
* * *
Tim Halloran and Liz Lawrence didn't go to work the next day either. They spent the rest of the night locked in each others' arms, and in the morning they both called in sick. And then they made love again, and after that they showered and dressed and went down and had breakfast, and after that they just spent the day wandering all around town, holding hands and looking like a couple of starry-eyed moonstruck kids, and enjoying the town more than they'd ever enjoyed it before.
Toward evening they went into a little Italian restaurant on West 47th Street for dinner. They took a booth for four, but sat together on one side so they could hold hands all through the meal. After they were finished and were smoking cigarettes over a second cup of coffee, Tim kissed her despite the fact that the place was jammed and other people were looking at them with amusement, and he said, very soberly, "I love you, Liz."
"I love you, too, Tim," Liz said.
Her words started his heart racing wildly, and he put his arms around her and kissed her again, holding her tight and making it a long kiss despite her shy embarrassment. Then he said, "Look, Liz. There's a weekend coming up and we can't do much about it for the next two days. But the first thing Monday, we can get our blood tests and go down to the license bureau, and we can be married before the week is over."
He saw tears start suddenly in her eyes, but she did not answer, and he went on quickly, "Don't cry, Liz -- please. I know that was a hell of a proposal, but I've never been much of a guy with the words, and I mean it as much as if I said it in poetry... " Liz shook her head. "It's not that, Tim," she said. "It's just that we -- we really hardly know each other."
He was suddenly angry. "I see," he said coldly. "We know each other well enough to sleep together, but not well enough to make it legal."
He saw her turn white at his words, and he said, "That was brutal, Liz, but I meant it to be. I'm not going to let you say 'No' to me." He kissed her again, and he said, his voice low and tense, "For God's sakes, Liz, do you know what people who've been engaged for seven years or so find out when they get married? They find out that, like everybody else, they didn't really get to know- each other until they actually got married, and just the same percentage of those marriages work out or don't work out as marriages of people who've known each other seven hours." He added, gently, "We'll make out, Liz. I'm sure of it."
The color had returned to Liz's lovely face, and her eyes were very bright. She said, "It's not that I'm unsure myself. I just don't want you to feel that you've made a mistake after a while. Are you sure you don't want to think it over, Tim?"
Tim grinned at her. "Maybe you're right," he said. "We'll both think it over. Until Monday morning."
By Monday morning, they were even more in love, so desperately in love that it pained them to be apart for even a few minutes. This time they told their employers the truth: they phoned and asked for time off to get a little matter of marriage started, and they were lucky, because they were given time off and not fired for having lied about Friday. And they were married at the end of the week.
They found a little apartment in the Murray Hill section a few days later, and moved out of the Madison-Plaza the following Friday. And neither of them ever worried again about whether or not they had made a mistake, because every passing day made it more and more obvious that they had not.
* * *
Carrington took Jane Matthews to his gynecologist friend the next morning, and the friend, Dr. Charles Turner, gave her a long and thorough examination and then took a series of x-rays. He refused to comment after the examination, and he would not tell them anything, despite Carrington's kidding complaint that he was trying to sound like Dr. Gillespie of the Kildare television show, when he showed them out; he simply said he wanted to wait until he had the results of the x-rays.
They came back together again the next afternoon, and this time he had an answer ready for them. "I'm glad you went into psychiatry instead of getting into my racket and giving me competition," he told Scott Carrington. "You always were the best diagnostician in the class."
"You mean I'm right?" Carrington said.
"You couldn't be lighter," Turner told him. "She's got an irritant tissue in there prominent enough to make her act like a filly in heat nine hours out of ten. How soon can we get her into the hospital and get her patched up?"
"Yon set it up," Carrington said. "AD she has to do b stop at her hotel and pick up a toothbrush and a couple of nightgowns."
* * *
Jane entered the Second Avenue Hospital the next morning, and was operated on the following afternoon. The operation was as simple as Carrington had said; she was in and out of the operating room, and back in her hospital room in less than an hour. Though she felt no different afterward, except for a slight soreness in her middle regions, she knew almost immediately that she had been cured; because although a half dozen doctors and young interns examined her intimately in the five days she was in the hospital after that, she did not react at all to their touches and their probing. Before this, she would have been wild with heat and hunger for nearly all of them, the handsome ones and the ones who were not so handsome, but now it might have been eighty-year-old maiden aunts touching her, as far as she was concerned.
It was not that way, however, with Scott Carrington, who came to visit with her twice a day as regularly as clockwork: the sight of him walking through the door of her room made her skin turn pink with immediate pleasure, and the slightest touch of his hand on her body made her tremble and move yearningly toward him. She had many visitors during those five days, business associates and friends, but all the others were meaningless to her; she lived only for Scott's twice-daily visits, and she spent the rest of each day fixing her dark hair and primping for his next one.
"I hope you'll continue to come to see me after I'm out of here," she told him once, a little wistfully.
"I'm not promising a thing," he said, smiling down at her. "The only reason I keep corning now is because it's my duty as your attending physician."
He had brought her flowers that day -- big, lovely, long-stemmed roses -- and he always brought something, flowers or candy or some other little gift, so she smiled back at him, and she said, "Is that right? Since when does a doctor keep bringing his patients presents?" He spread his hands apart. "All right," he said, "you've caught me, and I might as well admit it. I keep coming here because I've got a king-sized urge for you and can't wait for you to be healed and out of this place."
He had continued to smile when he said that, but her own smile faded slowly away from her lovely face. "What about that, Scott?" she said, her voice suddenly serious. "I mean, will this operation make me move in the other direction -- change me from oversexed to the opposite? Will I be able to --?" And then, curiously embarrassed, she stopped.
"Like a rabbit," Scott said. "The only difference is that it'll be a matter of free and normal choice from now on. You will when you want to and with whom you want to, not because you have to."
He had told her that before, but it reassured her to hear it again in this positive way. She said, her voice lazy and provocative. "Your diagnosis must be accurate again, Doctor. I know I don't react at all when the other doctors put their big paws all over me, but just talking about it now makes me want to with you."
And to her surprise and amusement, she saw Scott turn red this time. "You're lucky," he said, "that I'm a good enough doctor to realize you're still healing."
She was completely healed when she left the hospital a few days after that, and they went to her place at the Madison-Plaza to have a celebratory drink. She sat on his lap, a slim and happy and vivid figure, while they had their drinks, and after a moment they put their drinks down, and their mouths met, and his hand slipped inside her dress and onto her full, high-pointed breasts while they kissed. And then they undressed, and he carried her to the bed and they made wild, deep-felt, and abandoned love, their mouths and middies locked together and their hands holding each other tightly as they writhed and twisted.
When it was over, he said to her, casually, "You know something interesting I read in a medical economics journal the other day? I read that many experts consider it a detriment for a doctor to remain unmarried."
Her heart had begun to pound, but she kept her voice as casual as his. "Really?" she said. "Why's that?"
"The experts say it keeps patients away," Scott said, "particularly young female patients. They're shy about being treated by young, unmarried doctors."
Jane did not speak for a moment. And then she said, very softly, "Does that apply to psychiatrists, too?"
She had been lying on Scott's arm, his hand holding her loosely, and now he tightened his grip on her shoulders. "Well," he said, "it does to this one." And then he lifted himself and turned toward her and looked down at her, and though his next words were spoken lightly, his eyes were very serious. "I'm sure you know what I'm driving at, Jane," he said. "How'd you like to make an honest man out of me?"
"I've been planning that," Jane said, "ever since you told me that there was no Mrs. Carrington."
They were married two weeks later at a fashionable Fifth Avenue church, and, after a month-long honeymoon in the French provinces, they moved into a large and beautiful apartment on Sutton Place South. Though it's impossible to be certain whether it was because the medical economics experts were right, or simply because Scott Carrington was so happy in his married life that he became an even better practitioner, but his practice doubled shortly thereafter and continued to flourish and increase steadily after that.
* * *
Kenny and Emily Norris spent nearly all the rest of their stay at the Madison-Plaza in their room, just going downstairs for meals and sometimes not even bothering to do that. And when they finally checked out, walking close together and holding hands and their eyes shining as they looked at each other, the hotel's manager watched them leave and pursed his lips worriedly.
The moment they were out of the building, he hurried away from his desk and went to the elevator and told the operator to take him to the third floor. He moved quickly out of the elevator and used his passkey to let him into the suite the young couple had just vacated, Room 305-6, and he went into the front bedroom and got down on his hands and knees. He knelt there for a few moments, looking under the bed and shaking his head mournfully Then he stood up and sighed as he walked over to the telephone and asked for the housekeeping department. "This is Mr. Collins," he said. "Have a new mattress sent up to the pink bridal suite, 305 and 6. You'll have to throw the present one out; a lot of the springs are broken, and the rest are all mashed down."
He put the phone down and sighed again, and then he left the suite, and as he walked he complained aloud to no one in particular. "It's funny the way I can always spot the ones who really go for each other," he said. "And I can always count on an added furniture expense."
* * *
Vic Zachary and Reggie Graham woke up first the next morning, but they did not get up out of bed immediately. It was not because they awoke with renewed hunger for each other ]-- they showed this by lying apart from each other and not even touching hands -- but because it was no longer magical nighttime, and they were both suddenly afraid to face the problems of the day.
Then the decision was taken out of their hands: they heard movement in the room next to theirs, where Bill Graham and Grace Zachary had gone to bed together, and then they heard the catch open on the other side of the door and a knock which indicated that they should �pen the catch on their side. Vic got out of bed slowly and pulled on a pair of trousers, and then bare-footed, he walked to the connecting door and opened the catch.
Then he stepped back and the door swung open, and Grace and Bill, both wearing robes and obviously nothing else, came into the room. Reggie had gotten out of bed, too, slipping on the dress she'd worn the previous night, and the four of them stood there for a moment, looking at each other and awkwardly silent.
And then Bill said, looking at Vic, "Well, buddy? What now?"
"I'll put the question right back to you," Vic said. "Do we all take a plane together to Reno and have a nice, friendly double-divorce and double-remarriage?"
The question hung on the air as he said it, and the shock to all of them was evident on their faces; it was shocking even to Vic himself as he said it. It was the first time the statement of their situation had been made plainly and openly; it was the first time they had had to face the facts out in cool, clear daylight, away from last night's madness of waiting beds and straining hands and bodies and. hot-mingling breaths. And they stood there in silence after that, and all four were thinking disturbing, frightening thoughts.
For Grace, there was the sharp memory of the pleasure she had had in Bill's embrace through that long night, the different way he did things to her and the fact that he brought excitement to her while Vic no longer did. But on the other hand, she thought, standing there, there were other things to be considered. Seen in the glaring, cruel light of day, it seemed to her that he no longer looked quite as sensitive and interesting as she'd thought last night; his lean frame looked, in fact, sort of puny when he stood right next to Vic's broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted athletic build. And then there were so many things it had taken years for her and Vic to accept in each other; like the fact that she was always grumpy before breakfast, and the accepted understanding that if they found themselves with just one cigarette left in the house late at night, it was automatically hers even if Vic's tongue was hanging out for a cigarette, too -- things like that. It would be awfully tough to have to try to get settled with and used to someone new after all these years...
And as she thought this, Vic thought uncomfortably, too, comparing Reggie to Grace and wondering, despite the fact that Reggie had been pretty darned pleasant in the sack, why he'd thought last night that her looks were so superior to his wife's. He'd felt that way, he remembered, because she'd looked so dainty and petite that it had seemed to him that she made Grace look big and clumsy; but that was just crazy, because everybody knew he'd always gone for tall, well-developed girls, even when he was still in college and hadn't even met Grace. And anyway, Grace was no big, bulking woman: she was very slim and just as beautifully proportioned in her way as Reggie was, if not better. And there were other things to think about: the fact that Grace was always ready with sympathy, and some darn good promotion ideas, too, whenever business got slow, and the fact that she was the world's best cook whereas Bill had once complained to him privately that Reggie was no good at all with the pots and pans, and the fact that she never made a fuss over his habit of playing poker once or twice a week with the boys and sometimes losing more than he could afford, and a whole lot of other things like that.
And at the same moment, Reggie looked at Bill and wondered why it was that she had thought the big, hulking man with whom she'd spent the night was so much better looking. Perhaps Vic's features were a shade more regular, and perhaps his build was better if you went for the bull-strong type, but there were always two sides to the coin; and the other side of this particular coin, looking at Vic coolly and with the sexual frenzy all gone, was that he had none of Bill's rather special dash and class and intellectualism. And there were plenty of other things to be considered: like the fact that Bill was always completely generous with her and never minded how many new dresses or hats or pairs of shoes she seemed to buy, and the fact that he never complained when she couldn't sleep and kept the television set in their bedroom on even though this sometimes kept him awake, too, and the fact that their life together was perhaps not wildly exciting but it was certainly always pleasant and comfortable. And, after all, who knew what Vic would be like as a steady diet? He'd been exciting enough during the night of romance, but wasn't it also true that she was already much less interested in him than she'd been just a few hours before? And Grace had once confided to her about Vic's always raising a big fuss and saying she already had fifty dresses in the closet whenever she wanted to buy a new one, and he also looked like the type of guy who would get up and snap the television set off if he wanted to sleep.
The same kind of thoughts paraded, at the same moment, through Bill's mind. He was amazed at himself for having gone so head-over-heels over Grace, because it had always been a well-known fact among all his friends that he went strictly for the tiny ones and just had no interest in the big dames. Somehow, Grace hadn't looked as big as all that last night, but that must have been his middle thinking and not his brain, because she sure looked big enough this morning: even in slippers she was as big as he was, just about, and put a pair of high heels and a tall hat on her instead of those flat walking shoes and that little beanie she'd had on last night, and she'd tower over his average-height and look like his big sister. And, hell, sex wasn't everything; you couldn't do it all the time, and he'd already begun to feel he'd overdone it in the night that had just passed. So what if he didn't go wild when he and Reggie got together? The end-result was still the same; it was still pretty pleasant around the finish. And Reggie was a lot of fun in other ways: they liked the same television program and, though she wasn't much of a cook, they liked eating out and they liked the same restaurants, and she hadn't put on a lot of weight like some other wives but was just as cute and petite as the day they'd married? just his type, really.
And along with all of these thoughts, all of them had one same, additional thought, and perhaps this one was the most important of all. Each wife looked at her husband, and each husband looked at his wife, and each thought suddenly -- for the first time in a long while -- how attractive the other looked, and how nice it would be if yesterday could somehow be wiped out and they could return to sleeping together again as they always had. Because suddenly Vic and Grace looked at each other and saw a lot to excite them, and Bill and Reggie had the same feeling toward each other at the same moment.
A psychologist could have explained it: he would have said that their open act of flaunting and scorning their marital vows had, once their passion had died away, also wiped away their boredom and made them interested in each other again by giving them a taste of what it might be like to lose each other. But they didn't stop to analyze it, and the why and wherefore didn't really matter. All that was important, and it suddenly became overwhelmingly important to all of them, was that they should not lose each other.
It was Bill who reopened the conversation. He turned to Reggie, and he said, "Well, Reggie, what do you say? Do you want to break it up between us?"
Reggie evaded it. "Do you?" she asked.
Bill shook his head, so decisively that his wife knew at once that he meant it and was telling the truth. "No," he said, "there's nothing I want less. I don't know what happened to all of us last night, but I'd give every cent I have in the world to strike it out -- like it never happened. That isn't possible, of course, but I'm willing to do the next best thing if you are, Reggie: try to forget that it ever did."
And Reggie said, "All right, Bill. Let's try." And she put her warm little hand suddenly in his.
Vic and Grace had listened to this in silence, and they did not speak for a minute or two after that. And then Vic looked at Grace, the suddenly-renewed hunger for her plain and visible in his eyes, and he said, "Us too, Grace?"
"Us too, Vic," Grace said.
The two couples separated a minute or two after that, and, as they parted, Vic said awkwardly, "I think we're going to skip the rest of the show and head for home. But there'll be other shows and -- we'll see each other again."
"Sure we will, Vic," Bill said.
But they all knew they never would, because there was deep determination in all of them to make their marriages work from now on. And the sight of each other could only serve to reopen a wound which had better be kept closed, so they'd simply conducted their businesses without attending shows after this.
Connie Franklin thought the tall man who looked a little like Jimmy Stewart looked familiar to her the moment he entered the elevator. But she did not connect him at all with the man who had attacked her on that lonely street; that man had suddenly appeared before her as a wild, lunging thing, his face contorted with excitement and passion, and this man looked mild and timid enough to be a Sunday School teacher.
Then the man turned toward the front of the elevator and she could not see his face any longer, but she continued to wonder idly where and how she knew him during the brief ride up to the third floor. It was only when they got out of the elevator together and looked at each other face-on for a moment that, with sudden stunned shock, she realized who he was.
She did not want to do it, but, suddenly, she heard herself screaming, a short chopped-off scream; and in the same instant the man recognized her, too, and he took an involuntary step backward. And then his head turned frantically to look for a stairway or an exit sign, and he started to run.
And as he started to move, she cut short her scream, and she said again the same thing she had said to him when he had run away from her a little while before, "Wait!" And this time he heard her, and he stopped almost despite himself, and he turned toward her and looked at her, the trapped look of the wild animal in his eyes.
"Wait!" she said again, and when he seemed to shake himself and looked as though he were about to run again, she said, "I'm not going to call the police." And very slowly, because no one had come at the sound mi her scream, and because there was a strange friendliness in her tone, he walked back to her.
"What's your name?" she asked him, unexpectedly, and, equally unexpectedly, he found himself answering her. It was the first time, she realized, that she had heard his voice, and it was a rather nice voice, deep and pleasant and educated-sounding.
"Joe York," he said.
"I'm Connie Franklin," she said. And then she went on, her voice quiet and gentle and soft, like someone talking to a stray cat or dog and afraid the creature may be frightened away, "My room is 309, Joe."
They went into Connie's room, Joe still looking frightened and wary, but he began to relax when he saw that she was not trying to lock him in somehow and call the police. After that, they talked well into the night.
They found themselves talking with complete frankness about each other, and it was the first time Joe had confessed all of his crimes to another human being, and the first time Connie had spoken with complete frankness about the misery of all five of her marriages, and the first time either of them had put into words their realization that sex was no good to either of them without violence.
It was Connie who said aloud the thought that had begun to strain at both of them. "Maybe we'd be good for each other, Joe," she said.
And Joe said, "If it would only work!" And then he added, somberly and unhappily, "Or does it have to be accompanied by... attack for both of us?"
They found out, just a little later, that it did not. They had begun to feel increasingly attracted toward each other as they sat there talking into the night, and, all at once, they found their arms around each other and their mouths meeting, and then their embrace advanced its natural way from there. And in a matter of minutes, they were tearing and clawing and clutching at each other, just as frenzied and violent as they had been out there in the alleyway, and it was exciting and wonderful and completely satisfying for both of them.
They were married a few days later, Connie for the sixth time and Joe for the first. And as they left the church, heading for New Orleans because Joe bad never been there and was not in trouble there, they each had the same thought: It may work, and it may not. But at least it's got to be better than it's been up to now.
Somehow, both of them felt sure that it would work.
CHAPTER TEN
June moved along and eventually changed into July, as June inevitably does, and in time July moved on, too, and became August. And by the first of August, none of the people who had lived on the third floor on June 20th were there any longer. They had all gone elsewhere, each carrying along a better-than-average chance for happiness because of the things which had begun for them at the Madison-Plaza.
Other people moved into the Madison-Plaza and onto the third floor, of course, and they, too, had problems and experiences which were as interesting in their own way as those of Ann Wentworth and Tim Halloran and Grace Zachary and all the others. There were, for example, the man who moved into Room 301 and the girl who moved into Room 302 and allegedly didn't even know each other, and yet the" maid came in one day to clean up and found that the connecting door between their two rooms had been unlocked...
But let's not even go into that one. Because that, after all, is another story entirely.