Lover

Chapter Five

The salesman did not recognize the young man who walked into Brinsley’s at 2:30 in the afternoon that Wednesday. He smiled his usual smile and asked if he could be of service. The young man grinned back at him.

“Don’t you remember me?”

The salesman looked blank. There was something definitely familiar about the polished young man but the salesman couldn’t make all the connections in his mind. He tried to cover his embarrassment.

“About two months ago,” the young man said, “a fellow entered your store wearing denim trousers and a black leather jacket. You outfitted him with a complete wardrobe. Now do you remember?”

The salesman’s jaw fell. He remembered now. But he didn’t believe it was possible. The young hood playing Hell’s Kitchen Goes To College had changed magically into a young man who could have come only from a good family, who could have gone only to an Ivy League college, who could work only on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. The transformation was astounding.

“My speech is better now,” Johnny Wells said. “I use the right words and I know what they mean. And the hungry look is gone. I had a way of looking at people, adding them up, so to speak. I don’t do that any more.”

The salesman closed his eyes. He remembered Shaw’s Pygmalion and his brain reeled.

“I need two more suits,” Johnny Wells said. “I think a brown tweed and a dark blue Continental would be good, but any suggestions are welcome. And I can use three or four pairs of slacks and two sport jackets. Plus a pair of brown shoes and several pairs of socks and undershorts. And shirts. The striped broadcloths in the window looked rather nice.”

“You’ve come a long way,” the salesman said.

Johnny just grinned.

“How high do you want to go?”

“It doesn’t really matter.” Johnny said. “I want good clothes. That’s all.”

The salesman took a step forward. He was a little more sure of himself now. He remembered Johnny very well, remembered that he had liked the boy, and decided that he liked the present young man even more. His hand went to Johnny’s tie.

“I see you still wear fifty-cent ties.”

“A dollar,” Johnny said. “But I thought you told me nobody can tell the difference.”

“Not many people can. I’m in the trade. I have to be able to tell the difference.”

Johnny sighed. “I guess you’d better sell me a dozen ties,” he said.

It had been one hell of a two months.

He was sitting now in a small bar on West 47th Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison. He was alone and intended to remain alone. A small glass of cognac rested in front of him on the top of the bar.

It had taken him a few weeks to discover that cognac was the right drink for him. It tasted fine, for one thing. It was a good drink to order — dignified and not at all trite. And most important of all, the proper way to drink it was to sip it very slowly, a little at a time, with plenty of time between sips. A single drink lasted close to an hour. This was very important because he did not like to get drunk. He had become drunk once when he was trying to see whether or not he liked dry martinis. He hadn’t liked them and he’d lost the fine edge of his control. He did not want that to happen again. The idea of giving up just a small portion of his self-control was galling. Cognac solved that problem for him.

He glanced at his watch, a fat gold timepiece with a stretch-link band that he’d received as a gift from a woman whose name he could not recall at the moment. It was a good watch. It looked good and kept perfect time. It told him now that it was precisely 4:27. He glanced at the wall clock over the bar and saw that the wall clock agreed with him.

In an hour he was supposed to pick up Moira for dinner. They wouldn’t eat until seven or eight at the earliest, but she wanted him there at five-thirty on the dot. He decided that he would be ten or fifteen minutes late. He had discovered that it was almost a point of honor never to arrive anywhere on time.

He had upwards of half an hour to sit in the bar before it would be time to head for the hotel and change for dinner. It had taken less time to pick out clothes than he’d thought it would take. He decided to use the half hour to review the past two months. It was something he did frequently. He liked to check just where he stood and see just what it had taken to get him there.

He remembered all the way back to the first woman, the one he’d latched onto in the Vermillion Room. If she hadn’t been the first she would have been easier to forget. There was nothing special about the evening — a few more drinks at the bar, then a cab ride to her apartment and a trip to bed. But she had wanted him to stay the night so that he would be around in the morning, and that was fine with him.

He couldn’t sleep, so he got up and went into the living room and prowled through the bookcases. There was a large blue book on etiquette and he went through the entire book in less than four hours. This was easy enough. Most of it, he decided, was baloney. He skipped how to answer wedding invitations and what to wear to a funeral and all that sort of nonsense, but a surprising amount of information soaked into his mind and stayed there. The most important point, far more valuable than How To Shake Hands With A Duchess, was a fact which the book did not state at all but which was its underlying premise. It ran something like this—

There were two kinds of men in the world. There were gentlemen and there were bums. You were one kind or the other because there was no room in-between. You could work forty hours a week at an honest job, live in a house with wife and kiddies, and still be a bum. You could lie and cheat and steal and be a total bastard to everybody who walked into your line of vision and still be a gentleman. Neither Amy Vanderbilt nor Emily Post would have thought of phrasing it so succinctly, but there it was.

Period.

When you were a gentleman you got the right kind of attention from waiters and bartenders and salesmen and clerks. When you were a gentleman the cops gave you a wide berth. They wouldn’t bug you because they knew you were out of their class. When you were a gentleman all the doors were open for you and everybody in the world was ready to accept you as an equal.

It wasn’t strictly a question of money although that never hurt. You could be a millionaire ten times over and still be a bum. Or you could be a gentleman without a large roll at all, just so long as you dressed well and had a certain amount of leisure time. What made you a gentleman or a bum was less what you were than what kind of an effect you had on people. You could be a gigolo and a gentleman at the same time, because there was no contradiction in terms there.

Most of the other pretty boys who’d been in the Vermillion Room that night weren’t gentlemen. They were bums, no matter how nicely they were dressed or how well they spoke. They fawned over their women and acted as a sort of cross between a butler and a puppy dog. The result was disgusting. And Johnny was fairly certain that this only cramped their style.

The next morning he made love to the woman, then had breakfast with her. He left her apartment without making any attempt for another date with her, and he didn’t look in his wallet until he was back in his own room at the Ruskin.

There was a fifty dollar bill in his billfold that hadn’t been there before.

The next three weeks were devoted strictly to the pursuit of the status of gentleman. For the first time in his life he became a compulsive reader. Before, a comic book or a men’s magazine had been an occasional time killer at best. Now, however, he settled down to a steady routine that placed reading at the very top of the list.

He awoke every morning at nine or ten. If he was in his room at the Ruskin, as was generally the case, since most of the women wanted him to be gone when they woke up, he had a quick breakfast at the luncheonette a block away and then went directly to the main public library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. If he awoke in a woman’s apartment, which happened occasionally, he got away as quickly after breakfast as he could and went back to his own room to shower and shave and change clothes — then he hurried over to the library.

He never bothered with lunch. He read continuously from the time he arrived until five-thirty or six. He read everything. He concentrated at first on art and literature, racing through several general works on the subject to give himself a good background. He found out that he could remember everything of importance from what he read and that his reading speed was very high. He learned who had written what books and what in general they had to say. He found out what pictures belonged in which schools of art, and learned how to tell who had painted a certain picture. He soaked up a presentable background in these subjects in a very brief amount of time.

There was one problem. Frequently he came across words that he didn’t understand. At first he would get the meaning from context, but he quickly saw that wasn’t doing his vocabulary much good. Next he tried looking up each unfamiliar word as he came across it, checking meaning and pronunciation. That was a help, but it cut his reading speed to the bone and slowed him down, killing his comprehension as well. He would lose the whole thread of a paragraph or page or chapter if he had to stop and thumb through the dictionary.

He soon found the best method. He read with pen and notebook at his side, and he wrote down each unfamiliar word in the notebook without looking it up. He bought a decent dictionary which he kept in his room at the Ruskin. When he was done studying each day he went home and went through the list of new words, looking up each in turn in the dictionary and memorizing the word and its spelling and pronunciation. He tried using each word in a sentence so that it would become a part of his vocabulary. That procedure worked best for him. At first the word lists for each day were very long. Gradually they became shorter and his vocabulary increased at a rapid pace.

Gradually his reading interests spread to cover wider and wider areas. He raced through a basic text on Grecian civilization, another on the Roman world. This led him in two directions. He poured over two books on other ancient civilizations and several on medieval and renaissance history and culture. He found other books on more contemporary history, working his way right up to the present time.

The more he learned, the more he found himself not knowing. A short history of colonial America made him realize that he had to know some economics in order to understand what he was reading about, and he burned his way through two fundamental economics texts and got the knowledge he wanted. Another history book led him into sociology.

The sociological jargon was almost impenetrable until he discovered Thorstein Veblen and read all of Veblen in three days. The style was hard until he got used to it. Then it read quickly and he soaked up more theories and doctrines.

At the same time he realized that he was learning in a vacuum. He took to checking through the Times every morning with his breakfast until he had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the world. This helped round him out. It gave him a better picture of what people were doing, of what was happening, and his mental image of a gentleman was taking more solid shape.

That’s how he spent his days. His nights, of course, were used to different purpose — that of survival. He stuck with 59th Street for a week, then switched his hunting grounds east to Lexington Avenue in the fifties. The women there seemed to have more polish and just as much money.

He made the scene at the bars four and sometimes five times a week. There were occasions when no woman seemed interested in him, but those occasions were relatively few and far between. His appearance certainly didn’t hurt him, and neither, he was pleased to discover, did his increasing ability to converse intelligently. The women were not disappointed to find a young man who could find a more stimulating topic of discourse than clothes and food and sex.

When he went looking for a woman he usually wound up with her at her apartment, or at a hotel which she chose. Once or twice the woman had insisted upon coming up to his apartment, which annoyed him. But the room was more than presentable and the hotel staff did not seem to object if he brought a woman to his room. He was an ideal tenant. He paid his rent before it was due, kept his room immaculate, and never was drunk or disorderly. And the women he brought with him always behaved themselves. They were not tramps.

Some of the women had unusual tastes. One, whom he had been with twice, did not want him sexually at all. She was content to sit and talk with him, or merely to have him around. Her kick, he discovered, was simply to be seen in the company of a good-looking and intelligent young man. On their second date, which she had arranged over the telephone, he was only required to escort her to and from a party in a plush suite at a Park Avenue hotel. At the party he acted not like a domesticated gigolo but like a human being, which was what the woman wanted. He mingled with the other people there, used his newly-acquired knowledge in several enjoyable conversations, and enjoyed himself tremendously.

Another woman liked to be skillfully and painstakingly seduced. Another was virtually insatiable and left him totally exhausted — he made love to her a staggering total of six times in a single night and felt that he had more than earned the hundred dollars she gave him. Such women he very carefully avoided in the future.

There was one thing he had not done. He had not made anything resembling a permanent connection with a woman. Several of them knew his address and could call him on the phone if they wanted him for one reason or another, but no single woman was keeping him.

He had received an offer or two, vague ones that he could and did pass up easily. He both wanted and didn’t want a permanent alliance. It was security, and more money generally, and a better introduction into the world of the gentleman. But something inside him made him pass up those offers that he’d had. He wasn’t sure what it was.

Sometimes he thought that he was waiting for a better opportunity — either a proposal of marriage or a permanent association with a woman who was very rich and, at the same time, somewhat desirable. On other occasions he thought that he was simply resisting the notion of being tied to one woman, living with her constantly and being always at her beck and call. As what he privately termed a free-lance gigolo he retained a good measure of his independence. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to relinquish it.

There was one other possibility that occurred to him from time to time. In two months he had come one hell of a long way from a one-room roach trap on 99th Street. He had changed both his way of life and his personality as well. From a two-bit punk without a pot he had metamorphosed into an intelligent young man with a savings and checking account. It only stood to reason that this process of change would continue. If he had come so far in two months, he would probably change still more in the following two months. There was no way to tell what sort of person he would become.

And as far as he could see he would be tying himself off if he hooked up with a woman on a steady basis. He’d be putting himself in a backwater trading his potential for growth in exchange for a form of security which he did not really need. It wouldn’t hurt him to wait. He was young enough to bide his time and see what was going to happen to him.

His watch told him it was five minutes past five when he downed the last drop of his cognac and put a bill on the bartop for the barman. He left the bar and caught a taxi back to his hotel. It was time to shower and shave and dress. Then it would be time to see Moira.

Moira Hastings was something a little bit special.

She was thirty, which made her young by comparison with the other women who were Johnny’s usual clients. She was also quite attractive. Her appeal was less the Hollywood image of beauty than the Vogue image of chic sophistication. She was tall for a woman and she was very slender, with firm, pointed breasts and very slight hips. Her hair, originally a rather mousey brown, was dyed a pleasant rust shade. She wore it in a French roll and did not let it down when she made love, which she did quite well.

Any number of men would have been more than willing to keep her company and join her in bed for no remuneration whatsoever. She was not the type of woman who needed a paid lover, and Johnny would not have been able to figure her out if he hadn’t boned up on some elementary Freudian psychology. Now, however, he knew pretty well what made her tick.

She was a modern woman in the full sense of the word. She had graduated magna cum laude from Vassar and had taken graduate work at a school of interior design. After distinguishing herself at that school she found a well-paying job with a top firm of interior decorators. She stayed with the firm until her contacts were established in the field and then struck out on her own. Now she was a leader in her profession. Her income was sky-high and her work ideal.

Moira had been married once, and briefly, to a man named Gerald Raines. He was a Wall Street investment counsellor and came from a wealthy and well-established Philadelphia Main Line family. She divorced him after less than a year, obtaining a Nevada decree on grounds of extreme mental cruelty. The divorce went uncontested. She asked no alimony and no settlement. She wanted only her freedom.

That, Johnny knew, was the whole story of Moira Hastings. She was a career woman to the core. She wanted to call the shots and she did not want to be tied to anybody or anything. This made her the type of woman who preferred a paid companion to a voluntary one, if only because she paid for what she got. The money she spent established her relationship to her lover beyond any shadow of doubt. She was in the driver’s seat, now and forever. Her lover was not her equal and was not designed to be her equal. In this respect she was not dissimilar to a man who preferred a mistress or a whore to a wife.

She was not bossy and she was not demanding. She made certain that her superiority was recognized but she never became obnoxious about it. She was generous — her orientation made her lover the more desirable as his cost to her increased. She never gave Johnny presents, as many women did. Only money.

Johnny liked her.

He called for her at twenty minutes of six. Her apartment was on 53rd Street near Park Avenue. She occupied the entire second floor of a reconditioned brownstone and, naturally, she had decorated it herself. The decor was a little modern for Johnny’s taste but he had to admit that she’d done a hell of a good job with the place.

She was ready for him and she looked lovely. There was a fragile look about her, as if a man might crush her if he held her too tightly in his arms. Johnny closed the door and she came to him, her face up to be kissed. He held her gently and kissed her on the mouth.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was reading and I didn’t notice the time.”

“That’s all right.”

They walked together into the living room. He went to the bar, took gin and vermouth and made them into a martini for her. He poured himself a very small drink of cognac and they sat together on the couch and sipped their drinks in silence.

“Hell of a day,” she said finally. “That bitch of a Sutter woman has the taste of a barbarian. I showed her the color scheme for her damned house and she screamed. You should have seen what she wanted me to do to the place. Her idea of decoration is a cross between Byzantine and Mayan stupidity with a little jungle stupidity included. I think I managed to talk her out of it.”

He said something appropriate.

“You should see the house,” she told him. “She must have driven the architect out of his mind. Try to imagine a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright and a romanesque cathedral.”

He did, and shuddered.

“Uh-huh. That’s the idea. I got the story on how she wound up with the house, too. She hired Jacob Rattsler to do it. He’s as good a man as you can find and his price is high. He’s generally worth it. Then she explained just what she wanted and Jake’s stomach turned over a few times.”

“I can understand why.”

“You only think you can. You never saw the house. Hell, you never met the woman, Johnny. He told her he’d give her just what she wanted but he refused to take credit for the house. He wouldn’t sign his name to the sketches. She was dumb enough to go along with it and Jake decided to make it just as rotten as it ought to be for her to live in it. He may have had a little fun, because he came up with the most incredible monstrosity in all of upper Westchester. And she loves it. She thinks it has character.”

“Why don’t you give her the same treatment?”

“I’d love to. I’d really love it.” She sighed and took out a cigarette, put it to her lips. Johnny lit it for her. “But Jake can afford something like that. He’s got a reputation for eccentricity anyway and he’s established at the top. I’m not that outstanding yet. And interior decorators aren’t supposed to be oddballs. They’re supposed to be sincere professional craftsmen, not nuts.”

She tossed off the rest of the martini and put the glass on the coffee table. “To hell with Martha Sutter,” she said. “Let’s get some food, Johnny. Where would you like to eat?”

He pretended to think about it, then played the game the way it was supposed to be played. “Anywhere,” he said. “I’ll leave it up to you.”

She always asked him where he wanted to eat. He always let her choose the spot. It was a little ceremony they went through, and he felt it was quite consistent with the rest of her personality. She wanted him to leave the decisions to her, and at the same time they had to pretend that he was doing this because he didn’t care one way or the other.

They wound up at La Tete de Nuite, an expensive French restaurant in the east Sixties. Provencal murals decorated the walls and the waitresses wore abbreviated gamine costumes that stayed in good taste while revealing as much as possible of the girls, whose charms were definitely worth revealing.

The menu was entirely in French, which didn’t bother Johnny at all. He read it easily and ordered a shrimp cocktail, onion soup, and duck with orange sauce.

This was the result of another facet of his studying. Most evenings before he went to make the rounds of the pick-up bars he found a good restaurant which he’d never been to before. He had no more shame there over his ignorance than he had had at Brinsley’s with the clothing salesman. He asked the waiter the name of each entree, what it was, how it was pronounced. By now he could read menus in French, Spanish, German and Italian. He knew what each dish was and what it tasted like and how to order it — and he knew what wines went with what food.

Moira ordered lobster thermidor and he selected a dry chablis to go with their meal.

The meal was excellent. While they ate their chocolate eclairs and drank their steaming demitasse, Moira passed him a twenty under the table. He paid the waiter, left a good tip and pocketed the change. This, too, was standard operating procedure. He would just as happily have paid the tab himself, since he was able to afford it and knew he would get the money back from her. But she liked to pass him the money; it was another barely subtle reminder of their relationship. By giving him money she reinforced her position in the affair.

They left the restaurant and taxied back to her apartment. He put his arm around her in the back seat of the cab and she relaxed against him. He guessed that she would want to make love when they were inside the apartment. White wine almost always had an aphrodisiacal effect upon women.

He was right.

“Kiss me,” she said. He took her in his arms. She was tall but not as tall as he was, and she stood on the tips of her toes, pressing her mouth to his. Her mouth opened quickly and his tongue shot into it. Her mouth was warm, sweet from the wine and as he kissed her she ground her hips gently but sensually into his.

Now we switch, he thought.

That was more of the pattern. As soon as their relationship turned sexual their roles were reversed. He was supposed to be the aggressive male, she the submissive eternal female. It was an obvious reversal — he was not supposed to be the cave man, batting his mate over the head and dragging her off to his lair by her hair. Not quite.

Instead he took her and led her to the couch, where he kissed her some more and began the preliminary fondling of her breasts. She lay relatively passive in his arms, enjoying his kisses and caresses, and he told her how beautiful she was, how fine she was. The words came automatically from his lips and he wondered whether she heard them or whether they served solely as a kind of verbal background music for their activity. A little of both, he decided. A little of both.

Finally he raised her in his arms, stood up and carried her to the bedroom, stopping to kiss her passionately on the way. He was glad that she wasn’t heavy — as it was, it wasn’t much trouble at all to carry her to the bedroom. But some of the women he’d had would have given him a hernia.

He set her down in the bedroom and closed the door. Then they went into the next part of their ritual. She raised her arms high over her head and stood as motionless as a statue. She closed her eyes.

He stood before her. Briefly he ran his hands over her body. His hands lingered at her breasts and buttocks. She had large breasts, firm and pointed, but her buttocks were taut without an ounce of extra flesh.

Then he dropped his hands. For a moment he, too, stood motionless. Then he began to undress her.

He pulled the dress slowly over her head and folded it over the arm of a chair. He removed her half-slip, her bra, her garter belt and stockings, her panties. When he took off her shoes and stockings and panties she stood poised on first one foot and then the other, so that he could get the clothing off. When she was naked he stood and looked at her, then removed his own clothing as well.

Then he moved close to her again and began to caress her nude body. His hands took hold of her breasts and squeezed gently. He touched her thighs. He kissed her throat.

C’mon, he thought. Get going. It’s your cue.

She knew her cue. Her eyes opened and she gave a little sigh as she fell into his arms. She pressed her mouth to his while her hands amused themselves. She began to breathe very hard and very fast all at once, and he bent over to scoop her up easily in his arms and deposit her gently on top of the bed. He held her with one hand while he pushed the covers away. Then he laid her down and stretched out beside her.

There was one good thing, he thought. The ritual was pure baloney phoney from start to finish, but it had one definite point in its favor. For some odd reason the little game the two of them played made him responsive as a Texas steer. The simple act of undressing her while she stood like a statue got him excited. He didn’t need to work at it.

He took her breast to his lips and kissed hard. He ran his hand down over her flat stomach. She was all smooth and clean and she smelled of a pleasantly subtle perfume. He fondled her to heighten the flow of excitement that was coursing through her.

At first, he thought, he’d been a little in awe of Moira. More than a little. She was a new type of woman for him, something a little bit special, and he’d been fascinated by her.

That was changed now.

She was still exciting, but now he could see through her and that changed a lot of things. When you could see the uncertainty and foolishness in a woman you couldn’t set too great a prize on her. She had clay feet just like all the other statues. She was more fun than most, but she was still just a client, just a field to be plowed.

Now it was time to plow.

Hang on, he thought. This one will knock your hat off.

And then it began. She was violently excited now and she wasn’t making any attempt to contain the fury of her passion. Her nails raked his back and her teeth were active on his shoulder.

And then things began to happen faster and faster, and she thrashed violently on the expensive bed, and even the expensive bed groaned in metallic protest at the fury of their violent love-making.

Faster.

The world began to dip and sway, and the dominant woman submitted to violent male activity, and he was on top now, he was the boss, he was the king, and it was happening, happening.

They crested and the whole world went crazy.

They were sitting up in bed, smoking cigarettes and reading. He was reading a copy of Partisan Review. She was leafing through House Beautiful and making sarcastic comments.

Suddenly she put down the magazine.

“I can’t take it,” she said. “The pace. I’m going to tell that Sutter bitch to cool her heels for a while. I’m going to get out of this damned town for a week. No, make that two weeks.”

“Where are you going?”

“On a vacation,” she said. “I don’t know where. Vegas, maybe. I was there once for a weekend. I got my divorce in Reno but I drove to Vegas once. It’s a good town. You throw your money away and relax and enjoy it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Two weeks,” she said. “And maybe I’ll run it to three if I feel like it. Ever been there?”

He shook his head.

“Want to come along?”