April North

8

Saturday night April North was dressing for a party.

Saturday night was sometimes party night. Antrim was fairly short on parties, but occasionally a clutch of high school students gathered at the home of a girl or boy, knocked off a case of beer, danced close, necked with lights out and stopped breathlessly short of anything really satisfying. These doings generally took place on Saturday night, with church facing the party-goers in the morning.

But April was not dressing for a high school party.

She was going to a much more exciting party, a party at Craig’s house. She dressed again in the green silk-and-cotton affair she had worn on the night Craig took her to Kardaman’s and made love to her in his big brass bed. At first she hadn’t wanted to wear the same dress, but nothing else seemed appropriate.

“I don’t have anything to wear,” she had told Craig. And when he suggested the green dress, she voiced her objections.

“So what if I’ve seen you in it before?” he demanded. “I’ve seen you naked, and that doesn’t bore me either. My friends haven’t seen your dress. Wear it.”

So she was wearing it. And again she was wearing nothing under it. Maybe I’m being sluttish, she thought. I could wear a bra, and I could wear a slip, and I could sure as hell wear a pair of panties.

But she did not want to.

She compromised by wearing stockings and a garter belt. Craig said it was exciting to make love to a girl wearing stockings. Well, he would get his chance. Sometime in the early morning all the guests would go home and she and Craig would be left alone with each other and—

He picked her up at eight. She kissed her mother and father good night and ran to the car where he was waiting for her. He opened the door and she got in.

“Let’s go,” he said. “It wouldn’t do for us to be late. After all, I’m the host.”

“Am I the hostess?”

“Sure.”

“Good,” she said.

The days since Monday had been good days. Her schoolwork had slipped a little, maybe, but she could keep her head above water in Antrim High without half-trying. And, while she had not been with Craig every day, she had enjoyed herself, had seen him every other day and had been truly alive while they were together. And now, for the first time she would be meeting his friends.

She wondered what they were like. As far as she could determine, Craig managed the difficult task of belonging to a group while remaining somehow aloof from it. He ran with a certain set of people, people like himself — young and sophisticated, moneyed and wild — yet at the same time he maintained a great degree of independence from the group. He preferred to spend a great deal of his time alone, away from people, and she had the feeling that he was secretly glad he could not be with her all the time. He valued his freedom, even treasured his time to himself, and she accepted him as he was.

But what would his friends be like? Even though he was independent, surely he would want his friends to approve of her. Suppose they did not? Suppose they thought she was just a hick from Antrim, a young and silly little girl who was not worth their time?

She wondered if his friends’ reactions would alter Craig’s opinion of her. If they disapproved of her, he might think less of her as a result. She did not want this to happen.

“Maybe your friends won’t like me,” she had said, a few days ago.

“They’ll like you.”

“How can you tell?”

“My friends always like a girl with breasts like these,” he had said. And then he had taken her breasts in his hands and the gesture had taken them out of the realm of serious discussion and into something else entirely.

Still, she worried. Outwardly calm, with one arm flung casually over the side of the car and a cigarette drooping from her lower lip, she was still quivering inwardly with the fear that Craig’s friends would not care for her. While they might be duly impressed by her mammary development, this was not what she wanted. She had to be accepted wholly, not just as a body that could give a man pleasure.

“We’re here,” Craig said.

Inside the house, with the hi-fi on again, she helped him to get ready for the party. When her mother had a party — which, admittedly, was rare — preparations were complex. At least a dozen different sorts of salted nuts had to be set out, each variety in a different silver nut dish. Potato chips and cheese dip were comparably important. Occasionally her mother devoted several hours to the preparation of her cheese dips and she was known far and wide for them.

“But this gang is more interested in spirits than anything else,” Craig said. “As long as the bar is well-stocked, the party’s quite likely to turn out a success. A few extras, of course. A jar or two of paté, some caviar and smoked oysters. That should do it.”

“Do you have enough liquor?”

“Plenty,” he told her. “Scotch, bourbon, rye, gin, vodka and cognac. Two bottles of each to start with, and reinforcements waiting in the cellar. There shouldn’t be any shortages. Not even Ken Rutherford can exhaust our liquor reserves.”

“Ken—”

“Rutherford,” he said. “He has a hollow leg. His old man’s a rich alcoholic who never hides the bottles after he passes out. Kenny-boy started lapping up the sauce at the ripe old age of twelve and he never did learn to quit. He has cirrhosis of the liver. Can you imagine that, April? The son of a bitch has cirrhosis at age twenty-three.”

He paused, looked away vacantly. “He’ll be dead in two years,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Or maybe tomorrow, as far as that goes.”

“Shouldn’t he stop drinking?”

“He’d just as soon die, April.”

She turned away, fumbled for a cigarette. There were things Craig said to her occasionally that jarred her. This was one of them. How could a twenty-three-year-old boy accept death as a logical price to pay for drinking too much too often? The thought was terrifying. Was life that cheap?

Maybe it was. Maybe she was only showing her own lack of sophistication. But there was a thin line separating sophistication from insane dissipation and she was never quite sure where that line should be drawn.

“Will I have fun tonight, Craig?”

She saw him look at her, his eyes searching. “That’s an odd question,” he said. “Why did you ask that?”

“I don’t know.”

He put ice cubes in a pair of old-fashioned glasses and poured scotch over them. She sipped the whiskey, glad she had the drink now, knowing for the first time the meaning of definitely needing the stimulation. This was not as though she were an alcoholic, nothing like that. But she had had drinks before and she knew that they tended to relax her, to permit her to unwind. And she wanted to relax and unwind now.

She looked at Craig. The drink was not his first of the evening, and of course it would not be his last. He looked fairly drunk, she decided. His eyes were slightly glazed and his complexion was a little ruddier than usual.

He said, “You’ll have fun, April.”

“I hope so.”

“You will. You’ll be a bit lost at first, maybe, but after that you’ll relax and enjoy it.” He laughed. “When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it — an old saying from the Jeffers book of familiar quotations. You’ll have a good time, April. You don’t have to worry about it.”

She nodded. “What will we do? At the party, I mean.”

“Huh?”

“Well,” she said, “we won’t choose up sides and play charades. What will we do?”

He looked at her far a moment, then laughed. “Talk,” he said. “Drink. Mingle. And eventually we may see some home movies. Does that sound like fun?”

“Home movies?”

“Just an attempt at humor,” he said. “You’ll see, April. We’ll have a fine old time. Don’t worry about it.”

She finished her drink in a gulp, waiting for the alcohol to take hold and loosen her a little. Then she reached for the bottle and poured fresh scotch over the half-melted cubes of ice.

They were interesting people.

She had to grant that, right from the start. She was sitting on the low-slung couch with a man about thirty and a girl around the same age, perhaps a year to two older. The man had lost most of his hair in front and was compensating for the loss with a neatly trimmed black goatee. His name was Frank Evans and he was a reporter for the Dayton Evening Star, covering the police beat and doing general assignment work. He had sharp, inquisitive eyes and a high-pitched voice. He spoke quickly and did not seem to stop for breath.

The girl — or woman, really — wore dark glasses. Her dress was extreme, April thought. She wore leotards, black, and a tunic, green, and she used no lipstick and a great deal of eyeshadow. The tunic concealed most of her figure, but April could see that she had large, almost opulent breasts and long, strong legs. She was a little on the stocky side, with too much in the belly and more than too much in the rear, but while such imperfections might have kept her off the cover of Vogue they did not detract from her generally sexy appearance.

Her name was Margo Long. April was not sure exactly what she did. She seemed to be some sort of literary luminary, reviewing books for a Dayton paper and lecturing occasionally to women’s groups. Right now she was busily engaged in the popular pastime of putting people down.

“These damned parties,” she said. “I keep swearing not to go and every time another party comes up, there I am. I sit and watch Ken Rutherford put holes in his liver while Sue Maylor tries to make every male in the room and Larry Ellis sees how many girls he can shock. Look at them, will you?”

April looked. Ken Rutherford was easy to spot — he always had a glass in his hand and he was usually drinking from it. His eyes were vacant, his hair wild, his face pallid. April could not help being fascinated by him. He was quite thoroughly dissipated, a man on his way to an alcoholic grave, and he did not seem to give a damn.

Sue Maylor was on the other side of the room, talking to Craig and practically pushing her well-padded bosom into his face. She was a large girl with flaming red hair and a siren’s body — Craig had told her once that Sue had laid almost every man she knew and that the few exceptions were homosexuals. Now the redhead was pressing against Craig, her hot little hands moving toward the front of his pants.

Get away from my man, April wanted to shout. But she knew enough to keep her mouth shut. Flirting was de rigueur at these parties, she realized, and fairly advanced petting went by the name of flirting. She would be eternally labeled gauche if she made her objections known.

“Hell of a way to spend an evening,” Margo Long said. “I’d rather stay home with a good man and wear out a set of bedsprings. But here I am, damn it. I think I’ll go find a drink.”

She got up abruptly and headed across the room to the bar. April turned to Frank Evans. “If she doesn’t like these parties—”

“Then why does she come here?” Frank smiled sadly. “Because there’s no place else for her to go, I’d say. Don’t let her fool you, April. She talks a good game but she doesn’t hate the party as much as she makes out. It’s a pose with her. She dislikes the party to a degree, and I suppose she loathes most of the people here. But she’d much rather come over to Craig’s house than sit at home alone.”

I see.

He took a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and went through the laborious routine of cramming tobacco into the bowl and lighting it with a butane lighter. When the pipe was going properly he turned to her and smiled again, the same sad smile.

“Margo’s an unhappy woman,” he said. “You heard her line about wearing out bedsprings? She’d like nothing better, I suppose. But she’s not a promiscuous gal and she has trouble holding onto a man for long. She can attract a guy, sure — but that’s not all there is to it. Margo’s the dominant type, has to run the show or she goes nuts. Not every man likes to be dominated — damn few of them do — and Margo wouldn’t settle for the Casper Milquetoast variety. She wants a strong man and no strong man will stick with her.”

April said, “That’s a shame.”

“It’s her personal tragedy. We all have a personal tragedy, April. Every last one of us.”

“We do?”

“Of course. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.” He drew on the pipe and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Mine is simple enough. I was born in Dayton. I hate Dayton. I always wanted to get out of this backwater and into the big time. And I never did.”

“How come?”

He shrugged. “A perfect question. Unhappily, there’s no perfect answer. I had big dreams, April. Correspondent for the Times, political columnist, best-selling novelist. Dreams are cheap, April. Remember the song in Gypsy? ‘Some people sit on their butts, Got the dream but not the guts’ — that sums up Franklin Evans, Frank to his friends and enemies alike. Dayton pays me a hundred dollars a week. Dayton gives me steady work, so steady I’m scared to leave it. And I stay and remain bored and go to parties at Craig’s house.”

April found nothing to say. Frank let out a long sigh and followed it with a mirthless chuckle.

“So there’s my tragedy. And it’s not all that tragic. You need a heroic figure for real tragedy and I’m afraid I don’t quite fit the bill. But how about you, April North? My God, you’re far too young to be tragic. Why don’t you go home?”

She stared at him. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“You should go home. You’re getting yourself in for the wrong kind of scene here, April North.”

“Why do you call me by my full name?”

“Because it’s a remarkable name. You’re just messing yourself up, hanging around with a crowd of has-beens and nymphomaniacs and alcoholics. Has-beens? Never-wases is more like it. Stick around here and you’ll be just like everybody else. Are you living with Craig, April North?”

She flushed. “I live at home,” she said. “With my parents.”

“But you sleep with Craig?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Probably not. It’s your business, though.”

“What do you mean?”

His pipe had gone out. She waited, trembling slightly, while he thumbed the butane lighter and sucked at the pipestem, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth. When the pipe was lighted evenly he closed the lighter and dropped it into his pocket. He regarded the bowl of the pipe thoughtfully, drew on it a few more times, and then took it again form his mouth.

“I mean he’ll ruin you,” he said.

She said nothing.

“He’ll make a mess of you, April North. He’ll have you crawling on your hands and knees and when he shoves you away you’ll be rotten inside. He’s worked that way with more women than you’ve lived years, which isn’t saying too much, I suspect. He turns decent girls into whores and takes their backbones away in the process. He’s no good, April.”

“He has what he wants,” she said.

“He does?”

“He isn’t working for five thousand a year in a job he hates,” she said angrily. “He doesn’t dream about a New York job he’ll never have or a book he’ll never write. He’s far away in front of you, Mr. Evans.”

The words hurt him. She saw his shoulders sag and felt sorry for what she had said but not sorry enough to apologize. He stood up slowly, turning to her.

“Some day you’ll realize that Craig is a failure himself,” he said. “And by then it will be too late. For you, I mean.”

He left her to wonder what he meant.

Larry Ellis was short and stocky, with a sneer always present on his thin lips and a look of profound disenchantment never leaving his icy blue eyes. He had backed her into a corner and she held a cigarette ready before her, knowing that nothing could stop an aggressive male the way a lighted cigarette could. Yet he did not seem ready to make a pass at her.

“Don’t go into the bedroom,” he said. “Sue Maylor’s in there. Know what she’s doing, kid?”

“What?”

He laughed wickedly. He said, “I guess you are interested, aren’t you? You know I could kind of go for you.”

“I’m complimented.”

She felt herself blushing. His hand reached out, calmly and dispassionately, and encircled her breast. He squeezed and her own reaction completely surprised her. She loathed Larry Ellis with a vengeance and would not go to bed with him for all the coffee in Brazil, but his hand on her breast was enough to set her off. She felt the nipple stiffen, seemingly of its own accord, and she felt familiar jolts of desire coursing through her firm young body. She hated Larry Ellis, hated him and wished he would leave her alone. But the fact remained that she was getting excited.

He said confidently, “How about it, April, kid? How do you want it?”

“You’re disgusting. Let go of me.”

He released her breast, then neatly flicked the nipple with his thumbnail. Her knees felt weak and she wanted to cry. “I suppose you think that’s funny?”

She finally got rid of him. He tried to shock, she knew, but he had merely disgusted her.

Something else gave her the shock.

She was on her way to the bathroom. She paused to light a cigarette, and a bedroom door, opened. Two people came through that door.

The girl was Sue Maynor. And April recognized the man.

Craig.

There was a long minute, a long, unhappy and uncomfortable minute while she simply stood staring at him, her mind making the necessary connections haltingly.

The picture sickened her.

Craig, her Craig, a participant in the action. Her man with that red-haired slut.

Craig was looking at April, saying something to her. But she could not hear a word. Her mind was doing cartwheels and she knew that any moment she would be sick to her stomach. Craig was saying something to her, and the red-headed whore was looking at her, smirking at her, and it was all too much.

April ran.

She scurried past them, and raced down the carpeted hallway and into the bathroom. The room was empty. She ducked into it, pulled the door shut, and twisted the key in the lock. She drew a deep breath, shuddered. Her stomach was doing handstands. She went over to the toilet, yanked up the seat, and spent several minutes throwing up.

When she had finished, she washed her hands and face with cold water and sat down, trying to think.

Craig.

That hurt her.

Her man, the man she loved, had made love to another girl. Her man, who meant everything to her, had cheated on her. And now what was she going to do?

She had no idea. She could leave, give up Craig forever as Frank Evans had advised her to do. But she did not want to leave, could not face going back to life as an average little student at Antrim High. Craig was too important, and his friends were too important — no, she could not do that.

What could she do?

She wasn’t sure. She stood up finally, unlocked the door, went back to join the party. Fortunately not many people had seen her headlong flight, and those who had did not know what had prompted it.

Craig was at the bar.

“Hi,” she said. “I could definitely use a drink.”

He asked her what the matter was.

“Too much scotch,” she said. “I guess I don’t hold my liquor very well. At least I didn’t ruin the hall carpet.”

“You went by so fast—”

“I know,” she said. “I was getting green around the gills. But I’m ready to start again.”

He gave her a drink and she drained it.