$20 Lust

3

The silence was like a woman yawning. Then a buzzer shattered it. I leaned on the door and it opened. I was in the elevator on the way to the fourth floor before the buzzer shut up.

There were four apartments to a floor so I didn’t have a hell of a lot of trouble finding 3-C. I hit the bell, ringing twice again for the hell of it, and waited like a college kid at a whorehouse until the door opened.

I caught my breath.

“Come on in,” she said. “You had me worried for a while there. I didn’t know whether or not you were going to show up. I was all ready for bed and everything, and here you are.”

There I was. And there she was all ready for bed and everything. She was barefoot and all she was wearing was this pink silk affair that didn’t do a hell of a lot to protect her from the elements. It must have been thrown together during the war when they were short of silk.

I could see her nipples through it.

She had to close the door because I didn’t have the strength. I reached for her instantly but she sidestepped, a coy little smile on her coy little face, and suddenly I felt very foolish. I was out of practice. There is a rigid code of play in affairs of this nature and I was a little rusty on the ground rules. Maybe you think it’s a cinch to find yourself in a fairly decent apartment with the greatest thing since sex was invented. It’s not that simple. You have to be very cool about the whole thing, and I wasn’t.

“Easy,” she said. “Easy, baby. There’s plenty here and it won’t spoil. Take your time. Have a seat. Let me fix you a drink.”

She pointed to a couch and I sank into it like a grateful refugee from a Chinese prison camp. While she disappeared to concoct drinks I looked around the apartment and wondered how she paid for it. I had a pretty good idea, but what the hell.

“Straight or how?”

“Water,” I said. Straight liquor at eight in the morning is fine for some people. So is straight heroin. Me, I’m just a country boy.

She came back with two glasses and gave one of them to me. There was too much bourbon in it and not too much water but I took an obliging sip from it and set the glass down on the leather-top coffee table. I wondered if the glass would make a mark on the table and decided that, all things considered, I didn’t give a damn.

She sat down next to me and she was so close I could smell her. There was no water in the glass, just bourbon. She polished off half of it in one swallow.

I reached for her.

“Easy,” she said a second time. “You can’t expect a girl to roll over on her back the minute a cute guy like you walks into her apartment. A girl likes to be romanced a little. Why don’t you romance me a little?”

“Like how?”

“Like this.”

She gave me a gentle kiss. At least it started out as a gentle kiss. It didn’t quite wind up that way. It wound up like an oral rape.

She wrapped her arms around me and closed me up in a bear hug that put all of her very close to all of me. Her breasts came through my back and her tongue did things to my mouth that hadn’t been done to it in a long time.

Rosie was quite a kisser. Usually I like to lead but with her I didn’t have a chance. Her tongue pried my lips apart and flitted into my mouth like a hopped-up hummingbird, and all the while she was holding me so tight against her that I couldn’t breathe. Not that I wanted to. I was happy just the way I was.

She let go of the bear hug and I found out what air was like again. But it was only the beginning. One hand dropped to my thigh and she began to fool around a little. She played games with me and showed me a few little tricks that Mata Hari must have been pretty proud of. I grabbed her again and this time she didn’t tell me to take it easy, and I didn’t.

I got a hand into that pink silk nonsense and took hold of her breast. It was a nice breast to take hold of. I tried to cup it but my hand wasn’t big enough.

So I used both hands. I mean, what the hell. I’m an easy guy to get along with.

She liked it when I touched her there. She started letting out these cute little moans and her hot little hands learned some new tricks on the spot. Me, I was having the time of my life. I’ve always been inordinately fond of breasts and she had plenty of breast to be fond of.

I got inspired and went to town. Pretty soon the silk fluff was a tangled mess on the floor and neither of us could have cared less. I shoved her down on the couch and crouched over her, my mouth busy with her breasts. She was squirming all over the place now, her moans shaking the walls and her eyes clenched tightly shut in the agony of passion.

My hands were all over her. I found a spot on the inside of her thigh that set her off completely. All I had to do was touch her there and she started shaking like an aspen in a tornado and moaning like a Siamese cat in heat.

When I kissed her there, my lips working like sixty, neither of us could take it anymore. She told me where the bedroom was and we headed in that direction. I don’t know why we bothered. We could have done it right in the middle of the living room floor and neither of us would have minded it a bit.

But we found the bedroom. The bed was a huge affair with a brass bedstead and all, and she fell on top of it as if she had been shot with a medium-size cannon. I got my clothes off. Please don’t ask me how. I will always regard it as one of the major accomplishments of my life.

I was standing there, naked as a jaybird, and she was lying there, naked as a jaybird. She was also panting like a truck horse and, as I mentioned before, shaking like an aspen in a hurricane and moaning like a Siamese cat in heat. Her arms were at her sides, her hands balled up into tight fists.

I grinned like a Cheshire cat.

“Ted?”

It came out in a moan and I grinned some more.

“Ted?”

The grin spread.

“What are you going to do, Ted?”

I said: “I’m going to get into something more comfortable.”

It was weird and wild and wicked and wonderful. She was a big girl and her body was a warm cushion, a hot pillow that tossed me to the top of the world and back again. She started moaning when it began and the moans got so loud that at one point I was afraid the ceiling was going to come down on us.

Her nails dug holes in my back.

I was a prisoner in a huge fortress of breasts and thighs and acres of female flesh. I was captive in a sexual jail, a willing slave, a condemned man eating a hearty meal. I moved and she moved and the motions were a primitive dance to a hungry god.

It was incredible.

For a while there I didn’t think it was ever going to stop. Day turned to night, night turned back to day, and the whole process kept repeating like a spinning yin and yang sign. I felt as though I was being devoured whole, eaten alive and digested and assimilated into the body of this unbelievable woman Rosie. Sweet Rosie. My little Rosie, with one hell of a yen for men.

It got better, and it got even better, and it got better yet. And still better. And then it ended.

I felt like Samson, but with a haircut. I sprawled on top of her like a sack of mashed potatoes, the sweat gushing out of me in a steady stream, my heart beating a mile and a half a minute and my eyelids weighted down with sacks of cement.

I tried to roll away from her.

But she wouldn’t let me.

“More,” she said. “Don’t stop, Ted. You can’t stop now.”

“That’s what you think.”

“More!”

She was asking the impossible. If there was one thing in the world which I did not feel like doing it was what we had just finished doing. I was exhausted. Hell, I wasn’t as young as I used to be. I couldn’t take much more.

Besides, I was out of practice. I mean, what the hell. Enough is enough.

But evidently enough was not enough. Not for her, anyhow. Her hands got busy and her mouth got busy and her whole body started performing indescribable tricks, and pretty soon we were having another go at it, as the English might put it. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help myself.

And away we went.

I was beginning to see what Carl meant when he warned me against her. Good old Carl. He knew more than drinking and cooking. He knew women, God bless him. He knew which ones to stay away from.

I should have listened to him.

For a while I strongly suspected that my death was just a few minutes ahead of me. My heart was pounding, my head was reeling and the spots in front of my eyes had spots in front of them.

And then it too was over.

This time I couldn’t move at all. I just lay there in a pool of our sweat — it was impossible at this point to tell whose sweat was whose — and when I tried to raise my arm I couldn’t. My arm knew better. It stayed right where it was.

But Rosie wasn’t finished yet.

“More,” she begged. It was ridiculous, but she actually expected me to make love to her a third time without a break. It was out of the question and I didn’t even have the strength to explain to her what a silly notion it was.

I guess explanations wouldn’t have done any good anyway. She was determined.

If I had had the strength I think I would have laughed. The whole idea now was so funny it deserved a good laugh. But I didn’t have the strength. I just stayed right where I was.

And then she did something I had heard of and read about but had never before experienced. It was the absolute ultimate in sensation and it was totally unlike anything, any time, anywhere.

It worked.

The third time was bad. That doesn’t do it justice. Actually, it was horrible.

I didn’t have my heart in it but this didn’t seem to bother Rosie in the least. I did have another portion of my anatomy in it and that was all she cared about. I went through my paces with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy for intermediate algebra and the interest of a fifty-year-old whore at the end of a busy day.

When it was over all I could think of was getting out of that room before she killed me. I was drained, utterly and totally and thoroughly and completely drained, used up and empty and exhausted. I didn’t even want to think about women. I just wanted to stay away from them.

I got up and started finding my clothes. Then I turned around, and there was Rosie.

She had that look in her eye.

That hungry look.

And, at this stage of the game, she was one hell of a lot stronger than I was.

I still don’t like to think about what might have happened if I hadn’t been lucky. I might have remained at Rosie Ryan’s posh little pad for the rest of my life, however long that may have been. I have visions of an extra room in her apartment, a room filled to overflowing with the skeletons of other men who couldn’t get away in time.

But I did get lucky. I called upon what very little strength remained and swung, and I caught her with a lucky punch from somewhere north of third base. She had a glass jaw or something — whatever it was she went down like a ton of wet bricks and made a tired little heap in the middle of the bedroom rug.

I covered her with a blanket and left her there.

Getting out of the building was a hard job. It was a good thing they had an elevator or I never would have made it. As it was I had a hell of a time, but eventually there I was, facing the early morning on West 69th Street with drawn eyes and a haggard look on my face.

A cab passed, or started to until I hailed it. Taking a taxi a scant four blocks may strike you as startlingly stupid, but then you never went three rounds with Rosie Ryan.

It was the best investment I ever made.

The meter read forty cents when we landed in front of my humble home. I gave the driver a buck and told him to keep the change, which surprised him no end, let me tell you. Then I crawled up three flights of stairs to my own little room.

For a few long seconds I just stood there and stared lovingly at my bed. What the hell, it was just a bed. Not much of one, frankly. Just a single bed, no headboard, no footboard, just a rickety spring and sagging mattress.

It looked like Paradise.

So what if it was a broken-down wreck of a bed. So what if it only got made once a week when Mrs. Murdock saw fit to change the sheets.

It was mine. All mine. Mine alone.

And on that happy note I crawled out of my clothing, fell headlong on the bed and slept like sleeping beauty for ten delicious hours.

I woke up to dark skies and a headache. Rain passed my window without a comment and made splashing noises on the street below. I slithered out of bed, wrapped up in a towel and trundled off to shave and shower.

The shower was in one of its bad moods. There was no middle ground — I had to take it either hell-hot or dry-ice-cold. There should have been a special faucet marked lukewarm, but there wasn’t. It was a shame.

I took it hell-hot first and let my life drain out of my open pores. Then I flipped the whatchamacallit and had myself an ice bath that tightened the pores up like a paranoid virgin. The combination of the two restored my soul in some incomprehensible fashion and by the time I was dried and dressed and back in my room I felt almost human again. The effects of Rosie had by no means worn off — I was beginning to wonder if a total recovery was possible within the limits of a single lifetime — but I did feel a hell of a lot better. There was no denying that much.

I sat on the bed and looked at the wall like the catatonic Dr. Strom had warned me I was likely to turn into if I didn’t watch myself. I didn’t feel catatonic, just contemplative. It seemed like a natural time to contemplate. I certainly didn’t have any sexual desires to sidetrack me. I didn’t have any sexual desires at all, not after the morning’s roll in the hay. Roll, hell. It was more like a double cartwheel in the hay. With bells on.

Contemplation.

Too many years back to think about I had read or heard or doped out the way to get your mind working in regular channels. You had to figure out and enumerate, first of all, all your immediate and future goals. Then, once they were all down on paper, you figured out steps to achieve them. You wrote those down as well, and then you went to work.

Simple, but important. More useful than it sounds, also more difficult to do. But I was determined. Life was a little too stagnant just then and Ted Lindsay was getting to the stage where he was bored with himself.

So I found a pencil and a hunk of paper and wrote at the top: Eventually I want—

Well, what did I want? Money in the bank, of course. Every red-blooded American boy wants money in the bank. If you don’t want money in the bank there’s something wrong with you. I read that somewhere, I think. It was in a booklet put out by a bank.

Anyway, I wanted it. So at the end of the column I wrote:

I thought about it, decided that was too vague, and changed it a little:

That was a nice round sum. I don’t know exactly why I hit on it, but it had a good substantial feel to it. Poverty is not without its charm, but neither, for that matter, is money. I mean, what the hell.

What else? Well, I wanted to be successful, didn’t I? Fifty thousand dollars would make me successful, but it wasn’t just a matter of being successful. You have to be successful at something.

Newspapering? Making that kind of dough in the newspaper business is something that doesn’t happen unless your name is Hearst. Mine isn’t, and I’m glad of it.

The answer, then, was to make a wad of dough somehow — that would come in the second list — and then find the proper niche in the newspaper world. The proper niche? That was easy. It wasn’t pounding a beat on a metropolitan daily. It wasn’t swinging a desk or writing heads or rewriting or any of that nonsense. It was what half the newspapermen in the world spend their lives dreaming about. The other half, in case you wondered, spend their lives dreaming about being either foreign correspondent for the New York Times or editor of the Times, and they have as much chance of getting there as my half does. I wrote:

Now that was more like it. Settling down in some godforsaken town in the state of Atrophy, putting a paper out once a week, writing news the way I wanted it written and saying the kinds of things I wanted to say in the editorial column. Getting back to the printshop and getting ink on my hands once in a while. Setting type and making up the paper on the stone and selling ads and sending out bills and working up circulation campaigns and all the myriad of tasks that are the sole responsibility of the poor dumb son of a bitch who happens to own the tiny little paper that nobody reads anyway.

It was what I wanted. And, therefore, it belonged on the list.

There was one thing more. It was dream time, and I was the unbeautiful dreamer of the beautiful dream, and only one item remained to make the dream complete. It didn’t make much sense to put it on the list, but then it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to have the list in the first place if you want to get technical about it.

I didn’t want to get technical about it. I wrote, printing very carefully:

A wife who loved me all the way, the kind of wife who would be a complete wife, who wouldn’t grow away from me, who wouldn’t disappear some fine night with a nameless, faceless bastard and wind up in a smoking ruin of a car at the foot of an ugly ominous cliff. A wife who would help with the paper and cry when I was sad and laugh when I was happy, a wife who would have children for me and keep the house nice and make mad and passionate love and sleep by my side every night.

When you dream you might as well go all the way. But that’s the whole point of writing it down. That way it isn’t just a dream — it’s there on paper when you’re done mooning over it and you can’t just look away and forget it. It had worked before — one fine day I made a list and two days later landed my first newspaper job, a copyboy slot on the Louisville Courier. A year later I was on the Times, and a year after that I had a desk of my own.

And, I swore up and down, it was going to work again. Or my name was not Ted Lindsay.

It was all there in black and white — money, a business, a family. Now it was time to get some of the specifics on the list.

I wrote: Now I have to—

That was going to take a little thought: If a person could just sit down with a pencil and paper and wind up with a hatful of money, nobody in the country would have to work for a living. That might be nice, but as sure as God made little green spiders there was more to it than that. I went on to the next point, the paper. I sat around for a while but I couldn’t think of anything more compelling than Buy a newspaper, and at the moment the only sort of newspaper I could buy was the kind you pick up at a candy store. Step two couldn’t be solved until step one was all tied up with a pink ribbon.

Step three?

Hmmmmmm.

I was beginning to get a message. It had no logic behind it, but there was an intuitive impulse that said the same thing over and over, and a reporter’s intuition is the next best thing to a woman’s intuition — much as, as a wag once remarked, a reporter is the next best thing to a woman. I’m not sure what the bastard meant by that. Let’s forget it for the time being.

The intuitive impulse went along these lines. A certain doll had a whole bunch of things going. A certain doll was the key to a whole host of appealing possibilities. This babe could figure quite prominently in steps one and two and three.

Three guesses what chick I’m talking about.

Well, it wasn’t Rosie Ryan.

Nor was it Grace.

It wasn’t Mrs. Murdock either.

Give up?

The intuitive impulse said, over and over, Get a line on Cinderella Sims.

So, printing as neatly as any third-grader, I wrote on my list:

I can’t explain the intuitive impulse. Intuition, by definition, is illogical. Rather, it’s extra-logical. There may well be logic involved, but if so it is a form of logic that operates without the knowledge of the human brain. An intuitive logic, if you will.

What the hell.

What had happened? I’ll tell you what had happened. I was walking down the street, minding my business, when out of an orange-colored sky a girl came along who knocked me far enough out of orbit to make me take a flier with a sexed-up bomb like Rosie. There was an aura about this girl that was more than beauty and more than sex, a fascination that hovered over her like a halo, except, somehow, not like a halo at all.

Call it chemistry, or biology. Call it any damned thing you please, but there was a legitimate impulse telling me that the fascination meant that my path and Cinderella Sims’ path had to cross, that she was the key to everything I wanted and that I, somehow, was the key to everything she needed. Call it stupidity, or insanity, or catatonia, in the language of the incomparable Dr. Strom. Call it whatever you damn well please, I believed it.

I went over to the window and stared through the rain at the basement window across the street. There didn’t seem to be any lights on — either she wasn’t home, or she was sleeping, or in the dead of night she had moved to Saudi Arabia. Still, looking at her window gave me something to do.

I stared so intently at the window that I did not hear the footsteps in the hallway.

Nor did I hear my door open.

But I heard the voice, sweet as honey, soft as dewdrops, malicious as a scandal sheet.

The voice said: “Put up your hands, Mr. Lindsay. And turn around. Slowly.”

I put up my hands. I turned around, slowly.

And I caught my breath.

And stared.

There was rain in her hair and color in her cheeks. She was dressed in a man’s flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans but no man ever looked half so good in them. Her eyes were filled with fire and her pretty chest was heaving like mad, probably because the damned stairs were so damned steep.

There was a gun in her hand and it was pointed at the spot in my chest where my heart is supposed to be.

I will give you three guesses who she was. Not Rosie Ryan. Not Grace. Not Mrs. Murdock either.

The girl with her finger on the trigger was, inevitably, Cinderella Sims.

“Mr. Lindsay,” she said. “Mr. Ted Lindsay. You’d better talk fast, Mr. Lindsay. You’d better tell me everything there is to tell me and you’d better do it in a hurry or so help me God I’ll kill you.”

“But—”

“I’m not kidding,” she went on, her eyes burning and her hands trembling a little. If her hands trembled too much that howitzer she was pointing at me could go off, and if it went off it could make a perfect mess of the room. Hell, there would be blood all over the ratty carpet. My blood. And I had grown kind of attached to my blood over the years.

“You’d better explain, Mr. Lindsay. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

“I do?”

Her face hardened, if that was possible. For a second I was scared she wasn’t going to give me a chance to explain. But what in the name of God was I supposed to explain?

“What should I explain?”

“How you found me, Mr. Lindsay. Why you’re after me. Who you are. Whom you’re working for. What the rest of them know about me.”

She had to be insane. There was no other explanation for it — she simply had to be out of her mind. Either she was nuts or I was, and in a minute it wasn’t going to make much difference which one of us had marbles missing. In another minute that gun was going to go off and I was going to turn into a not-too-vital statistic.

“Hey,” I said. “Look. I mean, give me a chance to explain.”

“Go ahead.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I’m just a broken-down old reporter taking a rest cure in the big city. I’m not working for anybody. I mean, I sling hash at a diner on Columbus Avenue. Grace’s Lunch. You can call them and ask them. They’ll tell you.”

She sighed.

“And I saw you yesterday for the first time, and I don’t know anything about you, and I’m damned if I can understand why you’re holding a gun on me, and—”

She sighed again.

“Look, I—”

“Mr. Lindsay.” she said. “Mr. Lindsay, the sight of me yesterday afternoon was enough to stagger you. You recognized me, and I must say you were obvious enough about it. Then you followed me.”

That much was true. I followed her, all right. Like a rat following the Pied Piper. But what in hell—

“Then you started investigating,” she went on. “Checking the nameplate in the hall. Sneaking subtle glances through my window. Keeping my apartment under constant surveillance from the building across the street. How can you deny it when I caught you in the act?”

I didn’t even try to deny it. I was too busy wondering where they were going to ship the body. I’d made a big mistake, not giving Mrs. Murdock my Louisville address. They’d probably plant me in Potter’s Field instead of sticking me in my native earth.

“I’ve waited long enough, Mr. Lindsay. Start talking. And you’d better make it good.”