$20 Lust

2

The impact of the girl defies description. It wasn’t just the femaleness of her — she had the effect that anything impossibly striking and beautiful can have upon a person. I suppose a sailor who hasn’t seen dry land in years might react the way I did when he catches a glimpse of shoreline. She was all the seven wonders of the world rolled into one, a symphony of beauty, and for several eternal seconds I couldn’t breathe or move. I could only look at her and be happy that she was there.

How do you describe something lovely? Summarizing the various components doesn’t do the trick; in this case the whole is a great deal more than the sum of its separate parts. I can tell you that her hair was black as sin, that she wore it short and pixyish. I can tell you that her skin was as white as virginity personified, white and clear and pure. She was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts that showed enough of her legs to assure me that her legs were good from top to bottom. She was wearing a charcoal grey sweater that let me know that legs were not her only strong points.

But that doesn’t do her justice. It shows that she was pretty; that the various parts of her were in good order. It doesn’t show the girl herself, the beauty of her, the radiant quality that reached with both hands across the width of 73rd Street like a human magnet, reached me and grabbed me and would not let go.

You have to get the picture. I was on the downtown side of 73rd Street on my way back from the 72nd Street entrance to the park. She was on the uptown side of the street, walking west the same as I was, going from God-knew-where to God-knew-where. She was walking fairly quickly. I couldn’t walk because I was too busy looking at her.

Then I was able to walk again. I followed her — not consciously, not purposely, but without even being able to think about it. She walked and I walked and my eyes must have burned two small holes in the back of that sweater that so intimately hugged the top half of her body.

She waited for the light at the corner of Columbus. So did I. But I didn’t look at the light. I looked at her, and when she started across the street I crossed in step with her. My eyes stayed with her.

Her walk was poetry, her body music, the toss of her head pure ballet. I found myself hoping she’d go on walking clear over to the Hudson so that I could go on with her. I think if she had walked to the edge of the river and had proceeded to hotfoot it across to Jersey I would have followed until I drowned. For the first time I understood how those rats and mice felt when they followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They simply couldn’t help themselves.

Halfway down the block she stopped, turned and went down a flight of stairs, disappeared. I would have followed her if I could but it was fairly obvious that her apartment was off bounds to me. It didn’t seem fair.

For several minutes I stood on my side of the street watching the building she had entered. Evidently she lived in the basement apartment in that particular brownstone, a building quite indistinguishable from the identical brownstones on either side of it. I stood there, watching, committing the address to careful memory. Then it hit me all at once and I realized where I was.

I was standing right in front of my own building.

I couldn’t believe it at first. I looked around, very cautiously, and sure enough, that was where I was. I was smack dab in front of Mrs. Murdock’s home for wayward newspapermen. The girl of my dreams lived across the street from me, with her bed twenty or forty yards from mine. It seemed impossible.

I told myself that she must have just moved in, that if she had ever been there before I would have known it. Nothing like that could be within a mile of me without my noticing her, sensing her presence.

But who was she? Where had she come from? What was she doing, whoever she was?

I had to know. All the questions — the who what where when why and how that are burned so deeply into a reporter’s brain — they haunted me now. I had to find out about her.

The first step was simple. It required my getting the hell off the streets before the dog catcher saw me standing with my tongue hanging out and carted me off to the pound. It took a little work but I managed it. I dragged myself back to Columbus and aimed myself at Green’s. The notion of a cold glass of beer seemed tremendously appealing all of a sudden. Maybe because I was sweating.

I took a stool and the bartender brought me a glass of beer. He did this without asking. I was a regular at Green’s, although hardly the kind of regular that kept them in meat and potatoes. I was in there once a day, rain or shine, and each and every time I nursed one small glass of draft beer for half an hour or so, paid my fifteen cents and left.

There were plenty of the other sort of regulars. They started early at Green’s and I knew they would be there until the place closed, drinking their lives away slowly, never getting too drunk and never drawing what could be honestly described as a sober breath. Many times I’d thought about them, about the way they spent their lives, and many times I’d figured out that I would have wound up that way if I hadn’t left Louisville.

The bar wouldn’t be Green’s but it would amount to the same thing. One of the rundown joints on East Cedar Street where old reporters go when they don’t get lucky and die of cirrhosis instead.

I sipped my beer. I left the lushes to their alcoholic poison and thought of more intriguing things.

Like the girl.

The hell of it was, she was just what I needed to make my life complete. No sarcasm here — this is the straight dope. Before Little Miss Vision waltzed into my life there was nothing for me — no pleasure, no joy, no imagination, nothing but the monotony of a day-to-day routine that had become increasingly stifling. Now, however, Little Miss Vision had transformed the monotony to fascinating frustration. Now, instead of being bored, I was enhanced, entranced, and ready to be romanced.

Which seemed to be a new version of screwed, glued and tattooed.

Well.

I now had problems — which was, if nothing else, a change from monotony. Problem the first was to find out who in the world the lithe little brunette was. Problem the second was to get to know her. Problem the third, of course, was to get into her pants.

In Louisville the first two problems wouldn’t exist. I would simply say hello to her and she would say hello to me and I would take it from there. But New York was hysterically different. In New York you were considered horrifyingly square if you were on a first-name basis with anyone who lived within a one-mile radius of your residence. In New York you could live across the hall from someone for a lifetime without ever saying hello. And, in New York, if you said hello to a pretty girl on a street you were a masher and subject to arrest, conviction, and permanent residence in the Tombs; an unpleasant prospect at best.

I sipped some more beer and, amazingly, the glass was empty.

This gave me pause. It was a warm day and I had built up a fairly substantial thirst. I certainly could have made good use of a second glass of beer. Hell, I would have loved a second glass of beer. But my life was ordered in such a manner that certain habits had become damnably difficult to break.

I paid fifteen cents for the glass I’d just downed and left Green’s, still thirsty. It was warmer out, which struck me as somewhat silly in view of the fact that it was after six and time for New York to start cooling off for the night. But there was no doubt about it — it was warmer, and the freshness of the day was getting sponged up by a palling mugginess that had sneaked in from Jersey. The breezes had given up for the evening. It was, suddenly and very annoyingly, damned uncomfortable.

I headed back toward my room, then changed my mind and crossed the street to her side of the block. Already in my mind that side had an identity — it was her side as surely as if she had owned every bit of property on it. Before it was just the other side of the block. Now it belonged to her, whoever she might turn out to be.

I stopped in front of her apartment and screwed up my courage for a look at her window. It didn’t reveal anything — bamboo curtains obscured any view I might have otherwise had of my newly beloved. I cursed them, but I had to admit they were nice curtains. What the hell.

What next? All sorts of absurdities suggested themselves to me and one was sillier than the next. I could ring her doorbell and pretend I was a lost seaman from Canarsie. I could tell her I was a census taker and ask her some statistical type questions, like what was her name and how old she was and would she like to have dinner with me. Brilliant notions, all of them.

Think, Lindsay. You’re supposed to be a reporter. You’ve got a hot tip that you have to run down — which of course was ridiculous, because reporters only got hot tips in movies. But this is the way I was carrying on about them.

When the notion came to me it was disgustingly simple, the way most good notions are. I went into the brownstone’s main entrance — not the basement, but the front foyer — and looked at the row of name plates with doorbells attached. At the bottom of a long list of nameless names I found Apartment B, which obviously meant basement. I looked at the name next to it.

I did not believe it.

There was this black strip of plastic, and in white relief it said, for all the world to see, all bold and brazen in its simplicity, CINDERELLA SIMS.

Sure.

So, sharp reporter that I was, I immediately rejected that one and read through all the other names. Maybe Cinderella Sims was the janitress and they had a different listing for the basement apartment. Maybe I was in the wrong building. Maybe I had managed to slip into a different space-time continuum or something.

Maybe anything.

I floated out of the vestibule and down the stairs and across the street. Either my mind wasn’t functioning properly or something, but I felt a little dizzy and a small voice in the back of my head shouted Cinderella Sims until my eardrums threatened to explode. Implode, that is. Explode is when something bursts open from inside, like an overinflated balloon. Implode is when something bursts inward, like a vacuum bulb. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference, but, well, you know.

There was a book in my room that I hadn’t finished yet, a novel by Ben Christopher called A Sound of Distant Drums. It wasn’t the greatest thing since vaudeville but I managed to get lost in it and kill the too many hours before it was time to go to work.

I hauled my chair over to the window, eased myself into it, opened the book open on my lap and rested my feet on the windowsill. Every so often I would look up from the book and out of the window in the hope that Cinderella Sims would treat me to a glimpse of her beautiful body.

A few minutes before twelve I was taking my apron from the hook in back and telling Grace to take off whenever she felt like it. I let Carl know that a mushroom omelet wouldn’t be bad, picked up a dishcloth and wiped a few places on the counter that Grace hadn’t bothered with. She always seemed to leave some recent dirt around for me to amuse myself with. It was something to do.

The night started slow and promptly died. It was a Wednesday, which is never the most exciting night in the week and was setting out to prove the validity of that statement this particular evening. When I took over from Grace there were two Puerto Rican fellows gulping coffee at the counter and one shopworn old maid polishing off the special one buck minute steak. The old maid took off a few minutes after I came on and the Puerto Ricans had another cup of joe apiece before they vanished. They both left tips, which is rare when all you order is coffee. The old maid more than made up for them by taking up a table, spending a buck and not leaving anything: Such is life.

I ate my mushroom omelet. Carl makes damn good mushroom omelets if you care for mushroom omelets, which I happen to. The joint was happily empty while I ate, permitting me to contemplate why an old maid would be eating a minute steak at such a late hour anyway. Maybe she was just getting up. Hell, she didn’t have anything to stay in bed for.

With this observation, a whole new vista opened to me. The Lindsay method of behavior analysis. To hell with Freud, to hell with Jung and Adler. To hell, for that matter, with Strom.

The Lindsay Method of Behavior Analysis (I was writing it in capital letters now) provided the perfect key to understanding the inner emotions that ruled the lives of ordinary people. Like this:

A person acts funny if he isn’t getting plenty.

There were corollaries. The funnier a person acted, the less he was getting. If a person acted normal, he either was getting enough or he didn’t know what he was missing.

It was ingenious. It was the most fundamental observation since Murphy’s Law. It was perfection.

And I was pleased with myself.

I also needed it even more than the old maid. According to the Lindsay method, she didn’t know what she was missing. Hell, I knew what I was missing. I was missing Mona, but there was no sense crying over spilled flesh. I was also missing Cinderella Sims, and in addition I was missing all the other succulent female flesh that walked the sensual sinful streets of the sensual sinful city of New York.

Which was annoying.

Two young hoods wandered in. You know the type — they look as though they just stepped out of a 42nd Street B movie, with black leather jackets and ducktail haircuts and stomping boots. The movies probably give them their inspiration, I don’t know.

They took seats at the counter and I got uneasy. It always makes me uneasy when juvies come into the place and I’m all alone out there.

So what happened? So they each ordered black coffee; smoked three cigarettes apiece, left half their coffee, put half a buck on the counter for the two cups and told me to keep the change. I don’t know — you can take your sweet little old ladies and shove them. Give me the no-good bastards any day of the week.

But this still didn’t do much for my sex life.

So I went over to the side to jaw a little with Carl. This wasn’t designed to do anything for my sex life either, as Carl and I could hardly have been less interested in each other in that respect. Come to think of it, I don’t think sex in any form made a hell of a difference to Carl. All he cared about was cooking and drinking, and not in that order.

He was a bow-legged old goof, half English and half Irish, and years ago he’d shipped all over the world as cook on a variety of leaky freighters. He was one of those guys who always had a three-day growth of beard on his face. I don’t know whether it was because his beard didn’t grow any longer or because he never changed the blade in his razor. Maybe nobody ever told him you needed a blade in your razor. Whatever it was, beautiful he was not.

But he could cook like a stove. He kept a quart of white port in the kitchen cupboard and swigged it quite openly but Grace worked like a dog to pretend not to notice it. She had this self-imposed rule against keeping an alcoholic on the payroll, and if there was ever an alcoholic, Carl was it. If she let herself admit this little fact she would have been honor-bound to chuck him out on his ear, which would have knocked her business into Kings County. So she ignored the bottle and Carl cooked a blue streak and everybody was happy, especially the customers.

“Carl,” I said, “I need a woman.”

“Everybody does.”

“I mean it,” I said. “I need a woman.”

“In this neighborhood,” he said thoughtfully, “even the women need a woman now and then. You seen the fleet of dykes we been getting lately?”

“Many of them?”

He shook his head as if every incidence of lesbianism was depriving him of a potential conquest. “A pair of ’em came in ere this afternoon, one of ’em you couldn’t of told from a man. Without you turn her upside-down and have a good look, that is.”

I forgot to mention another of Carl’s virtues. He worked sixteen hours a day. This can make a hard-headed businesswoman like Grace overlook one hell of a lot of white port. And why not? Like in the song, a good man is hard to find. Especially at the wages she was handing out.

“These dykes,” he was saying. “I got a look at ’em through the serving slot, you know. You took a close look, you could tell the one was a broad underneath it all. Probably even had a pair of boobs on her, although I’ll lay odds she was embarrassed that she did. But the other one. A doll. A doll.”

“Yeah?” My conversation was a little less than brilliant.

“A redhead,” he said. “Not a freckle-face redhead. A peaches-and-cream redhead. Built for action. And I would stand there, you know, and I would think about this dirtpicking dyke and the things she’d be doing to this peaches-and-cream redhead, those hammy hands on the chick and her mouth and everything, and the peaches-and-cream redhead squirming around and loving it and all, and let me tell you, it made me sick to my stomach.”

“The redhead was really something, huh?”

He shook his head, his eyes as sad as a Charlie Chaplin movie. “Built,” he said. “Built for action. I got a look at her going out when she stood up. Boobs on her out to here. A behind with a motion like a pogo stick. I thought about her and that dyke, you know, and I got an idea what the two of ’em would be doing. It made me sick.”

Him it made sick. Me it made more frustrated than ever. I needed that talk with Carl like I needed a broken collarbone.

“They ordered eggs,” he said. “Fried and over, you know. Let me tell you, I burned those eggs. I burned ’em crisp as leather. Maybe crisper.”

The redhead who came in a few minutes of four was not the peaches-and-cream variety. She was the freckle-faced variety, and if she was a lesbian I was the faggot’s Prince of Wales.

No woman ever oozed heterosexual sex the way this one did. No woman since Cleopatra. Possibly no woman since Sheba. Possibly no woman since Eve.

She wasn’t pretty. Her nose was too big and her forearms were too fat and her eyes were bloodshot. But her breasts were pair of warm pineapples and her lips were the color of spilled blood and the look in her eyes said something that rhymes with pluck-me.

She wanted a hamburger and a Coke. I told Carl and he put down the bottle and went to work. Then, because Cinderella Sims had set fire to a fuse which had lain dormant all too long, I went back and leered across the counter at her. She leered right back at me. She seemed even more interested in the leering process than I was, which was saying a lot. My tongue may well have been hanging out. This should give you the general idea.

“You’re cute,” she said.

“So are you.”

“That’s not all,” she said. “I’m more than cute, I’m good at it.”

“At what?”

“At what you’re thinking about.”

I tried to look innocent. I’m sorry to say that it didn’t come off.

“What’s your name?”

“Ted.”

“Mine’s Rosie.”

“Hi, Rosie.”

“Hi, Ted.”

Our dialogue wasn’t the best since Tarzan and Jane. Me, I’ll take Harpo Marx any time.

“What you looking at me like that for, Ted?”

“I like the way you’re put together.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded solemnly.

“It’s all me.”

“Honest?”

“Don’t you believe me?”

I shrugged.

“So grab a feel. I won’t miss it.”

I reached over the counter and took hold of one of her big breasts. The whole thing was coarse and crude and vulgar but the breast in my hand was the first I’d had hold of in months. Too many months.

And it worked for both of us. I got more excited over the whole thing than I care to admit and she was evidently the type of gal with a short fuse. She was ready to go then and there. Her eyes seemed to be swimming in heat and her mouth was open, her upper lip glistened with sweat.

“Ted—”

I let go of her breast. It wasn’t something I felt like letting go of too easily.

Carl broke the spell. He rang a little bell and I went back to pick up the burger and draw a glass of Coke for her. He was waiting for me at the window, his eyes wary.

“Teddy boy,” he said, “that one you should watch out for. Give her a wide berth. She’s poison.”

“You know her?”

“Don’t have to,” he told me. “I know her type. She’ll turn you inside out and holler for more. She’ll draw you and drain you until your knees won’t work anymore. She’ll have you so tired you won’t be able to work for the next month and a half. Watch out, boy.”

I grinned at him. “Maybe I need some of that, Carl. It’s been a long time.”

He sighed. “How long? Ten years? Twenty years? Me, I could go twenty years before I’d want to tangle with one like her. She’ll eat you alive, Ted. She’ll drink your blood and use your skin for a snot rag. You young fellows, you don’t know anything but get on and ride. Me, I’d give her a wide berth.”

Young fellows. When I hit thirty I thought people would stop thinking of me as a young fellow. They didn’t, somehow.

“I’ll see what happens,” I told him. “Like I say, it’s been a long time.”

I brought her her food and traded wisecracks with her for a while. Every look at her and every look from her made me a little more anxious to get next to her, but at the same time Carl’s words had had a mildly sobering effect. I wanted to make it with her, but I didn’t want to talk about it.

Eddie saved me.

Eddie’s a cop who looks as though he couldn’t be anything else without looking out of place. He’s a heavyset flatfoot who generally stops by for coffee-an’ about that time of night. When he came in I had an excuse to leave Rosie alone and make like a counterman. The excuse seemed to satisfy her. Obviously I couldn’t play with her breasts with a cop in the room. It made good sense.

Eddie and I had never had a hell of a lot to say to each other in the past, but this time we did it up brown. I was very clever about the whole thing if I say so myself. I made it seem as though Eddie was leading me and I couldn’t cut the conversation short without being obnoxious about it. Actually I was doing the leading, but happily neither Eddie nor my freckle-face tumbled to that end of it.

She left before Eddie did and I was vaguely relieved to see her go. I wanted her — any man would have — but I suppose you could say I was a little bit afraid of her. Carl’s message had hit home. She looked like the kind of girl who needed an army, and although that can be a man’s dream when he’s sort of hard up, I’d met up with a girl like that before. She couldn’t get enough, and no matter how much I gave her she was still itching for more. In its own way this can be one hell of a frustrating experience.

When Eddie left I went back and picked up Rosie’s tab. It came to forty-five cents and there was a quarter and two dimes on the counter beside it. No tip, and I don’t suppose I really had one coming.

Then, when I was carrying the check to the register to ring it up, I saw the penciled scrawl on the back:

There it was — straight and not at all subtle, right on the line. I rang up the sale, spilled the forty-five cents into the register and spiked the tab. And visions of red hair on a white pillowslip flooded my brain.

And there it was. What could be simpler? All I had to do was hotfoot it over to 114 West 69th as soon as my shift limped to a halt, ring her bell twice, race upstairs and try my luck with the redoubtable Rosie. A half-year’s accumulation of sexual inactivity ought to last me a long time, even with an insatiable maiden like Rosie.

The funny thing is, I was resisting the whole notion not because of a fear of what Rosie could do to me, or anything like that, but for an entirely different reason. It was, I realized, out of some perverse loyalty to a girl I had never met, a girl with the improbable name of Cinderella Sims.

Which was ridiculous.

Totally ridiculous.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus the face of Cinderella Sims on my brain. It didn’t work. I had seen her once, and for no more than a matter of minutes. I couldn’t even picture her face, although of course I would recognize her at once, anytime, anywhere.

All that I could remember was that she was the most beautiful girl in the world.

For all I knew she was as gay as the pair of lesbians Carl had described in such unglowing terms. Or she could be married, or frigid, or deaf, or her teeth could be bad and her speech all impedimented and—

Hell. I didn’t believe a thought of it. She was perfection, damn it. How often in life do you run up against perfection? How often do you find something that couldn’t be improved, not one whit, not one speck, not at all?

Not very often.

So here she was, and here I was, and here Rosie was. Miss Cinderella Sims was temporarily unobtainable but this alone was no call for me to throw myself away on a most imperfect specimen who offered nothing but temporary sexual relief. What the hell — I’d been living in silly celibacy for half a year.

There was no point to throwing it all away on a sexbomb who’d probably given it away to half the male population of the island of Manhattan.

So it’s easy to see what I did next. I finished up, you see, and then I went straight home. Straight home to my own little room, where I got undressed, got in bed, pulled up the sheet, blew a kiss to my somnolent beloved and went off to sleep.

And that, of course, is what I did.

Right?

Wrong.

I finished up, all right. Grace took over at eight on the button — she was another idiot who didn’t mind a sixteen-hour day — and a monkey named Leon relieved Carl, who took his jug of wine and went home. I hung up my apron, had a wakeup cup of joe and went out into the morning rush hour air, which was horrible.

But I did not go home.

I went elsewhere.

I went to 114 West 69th Street. Up the stairs, into the front vestibule. I looked at the nameplates and found out that Rosie’s last name was Ryan.

She was lucky on that score. If it had been O’Grady I would have gotten the hell out of there once and for all. Sweet Rosie O’Grady at eight o’clock in the goddamned morning is a bit much.

Or if she lived on Washington Square. You know the song:

Well, anyhow. I stood in that vestibule and thought about things, but not too deeply. And then I found the bell for her apartment, Apt. 3-C.

And I rang it.

Twice.