Lover

Chapter Six

He played it cool but not too cool. He knew that if he acted as enthusiastic as he felt he’d be weakening his position. She valued articles in accordance with her difficulty in obtaining them. So he played hard to get — but not too hard.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a distance.”

“Travel is broadening. You must be getting sick of this town, Johnny.”

“It’s a good town. I don’t know.”

“Think about it.”

He thought, or pretended to. “How would we work it? I don’t care for artificial husband-and-wife routines.”

“Adjoining rooms. A good hotel asks no questions. Especially in Nevada.”

He nodded. “That seems sensible,” he said. “But why would you want me along?”

“For company. You know me, Johnny. I get lonely easily. And I enjoy your company.”

He didn’t put up much of an argument but let himself be talked into it easily from that point on. The arrangements were simple enough. She would pay all expenses — air transportation there and back, the hotel bill, all meals. She’d give him spending money and gambling money.

It sounded fine.

The next morning he paid two more weeks rent on his room at the Ruskin, told the manager he’d be out of town for an indeterminate period of time, and packed his two suitcases. He didn’t want to check out of the Ruskin, not for two weeks rent. He liked the room and wanted it to be waiting for him when he returned. Besides, he couldn’t take all his clothes with him. He had to have a place to leave them.

He met Moira and they taxied to LaGuardia, caught a flight to Vegas non-stop. They registered in adjoining singles at the Calypso House, the newest and most expensive hotel and gambling palace on the Strip. They went to their rooms, changed, and met in the hallway. Johnny figured they’d grab a bite to eat, then see a show or something. But he hadn’t figured out Moira’s second greatest vice, second only to sex.

It was gambling.

They went to the casino right off the bat and she bee-lined for the roulette wheel, pausing only to convert a thousand dollars into fifty-dollar chips. He followed her and stood by her side. She bet the chips one at a time, betting an individual number on each spin of the wheel. He watched her lose two hundred fifty dollars in five straight spins of the wheel. It was her money, but he couldn’t figure out why she wanted to throw it away on sucker bets. The house had the percentage no matter what kind of gambling you were doing. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any house. But the house edge in roulette was a little better than average, which was frightening. Not as bad as the horse races, maybe, but bad enough.

“Why don’t you switch to craps,” he suggested. “The odds are better.”

She turned on him. She handed him four chips. “You switch to craps,” she said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I’d rather play alone,” she snapped. “Meet me later.”

He didn’t argue with her. He took the chips and held them in the palm of his hand. Fifty bucks a chip, he thought. He could put all four on one roll of the dice if he wanted. He could bet them one at a time. Or he could cash them in, tell her he’d lost his money. It wouldn’t matter whether she believed him or not, because she wouldn’t give a damn.

He compromised. He walked to the nearest cashier’s cage and passed over the four chips. “Cash two of these,” he said. “And break the rest into dollars.”

The cashier did a long double take and Johnny decided that it must have been an unusual request. It made sense to him. He’d drag half the money for himself, then use the others to pass the time. Gambling wasn’t his kick, but it would make the time pass a little faster.

The cashier followed instructions. Johnny put two fifties in his wallet and found his way to a crap table. He played the way very few people play dice. He bet only against the shooter and made his bets only after the shooter had rolled his point. When it was his turn with the dice he passed. His bet was always two dollars, never more and never less.

When you shoot craps in this manner the odds are slightly in your favor. If you do it long enough, and consistently enough, you will get rich. If you do anything long enough and consistently enough with the odds always constant and unyielding in your favor, you will grow rich.

This is mathematics.

He played for two hours. He passed the dice many times in the course of the two hours, a practice which seemed to amuse some of the players. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to roll.

He was even with them. He couldn’t understand why they’d buck the odds.

At the end of the two hours he cashed in one hundred and forty dollars worth of chips. It was a small profit but it pleased him. He had been lucky. The odds weren’t that strongly in his favor. At one point, when a shooter made five straight passes, He was beginning to lose faith in higher mathematics. But he was pleased.

He wandered back to the roulette wheel. Moira wasn’t there. He looked around, spotted her at another cashier’s cage. She was buying more chips. He wondered whether this was her second trip to the cage — or her twentieth.

He never found out. She didn’t talk about how much she lost, and he knew better than to ask her. If she wanted him to know she would tell him herself.

She was a creature of patterns, and once again the pattern was established and followed to the letter. Every day she gave him two hundred dollars when they finished breakfast at noon or later. They met for dinner — then she returned to the casino and he amused himself whatever way he wanted. At night he made love to her if she indicated that she was in the mood. She did so rarely, never two nights in a row and never more than one time in one night.

He had enough time for himself so that he could line up women on his own. Money didn’t bother him — he was making a minimum of a hundred dollars a day from Moira — so he no longer spent his time looking for wealthy women ready to pay for him. Instead he shopped for what he wanted.

He picked up a waitress in a restaurant and spent a hectic evening at her cottage. She was young and blonde and wild. Sex was her sole interest and she couldn’t get enough to make her happy. While they rested between bouts she told him anecdotes of her own personal and none-too-private life.

“One time I did it with five boys at once,” she said happily. “Can you imagine?”

He couldn’t imagine.

“Five at once,” she repeated dreamily. “You never felt anything like it. Groovy.”

“You mean one after the other?”

“No, all at once, dummy. I did it like one after the other lots of times. You know, like a line-up. More than five, you can bet on it. Sixteen one time. One after the other, sixteen of them, I like to die it felt so good. But this time the five was at once, all of them.”

He asked her how she had managed it.

“One here,” she explained. “Naturally. And another one there. That much they call a sandwich. Then another one here and two more here and there. See?”

He saw.

“It’s too bad there weren’t two more guys,” she added. “I still had two hands free. But the hell with it. Let’s go again, Johnny.”

Fortunately for his health, the one evening was all he spent with the nymphomaniacal waitress. But despite such distractions he still spent a great deal of time thinking about Moira. She wasn’t even gambling sensibly. She reversed the usual gambler’s desperation play — whenever she won a bet she kept doubling up until she lost it all.

It was a simple case of her constantly trying to lose everything she had.

He tried to fit that in with what he knew about her. She wanted to be independent, wanted to be on top with no strings attached. And at the same time she felt that she was bad, and she was losing her money at the roulette wheel because she wanted to punish herself. That much almost anybody could figure out, he thought. But he would never know why.

Not that he cared. He was making good money doing next to nothing. He was getting rich, and in another couple of days they’d be on their way back to New York and he’d have a roll of dough to stash in the bank. If she wanted to be an idiot that was her business. He didn’t give a damn. He was making his profit and the hell with her.

There was only one thing he’d been worried about when she suggested the trip. The feeling persisted that some other guy might beat his time with her and he’d be out in the cold. But that didn’t bother him now. Vegas was swimming with pretty boys who could be made for a price — some of them ready to roll with a man or a woman, whoever asked first. But Moira was barely interested in him, let alone anybody else. The gigolos patently ignored her. They knew well enough that she wasn’t having any. Johnny had no worries.

At least he thought so.

It was Saturday night. It had been a pretty ordinary day for Johnny — breakfast at one in the afternoon, a swim in the hotel pool, an hour at the crap table during which he’d dropped seventeen dollars, dinner with Moira, a floor show at another hotel down the Strip. He’d gone to the show alone — Moira was too busy losing money to be bothered with entertainment. He felt like pointing out that she could spend as much money on the floorshow as she could lose, but didn’t bother. He figured that she might fail to appreciate his wit.

He walked into the lobby of the Calypso House, got his key at the desk and rode upstairs in the elevator. Moira would be downstairs in the casino, he guessed. She seldom quit before two-thirty and it was only a few minutes past one.

When he saw her door ajar he thought her apartment was being frisked. But that didn’t seem logical — what burglar left the door ajar and turned the light on? None he had ever heard of.

His next thought was that she was in her apartment and letting him know that she wanted him. But that didn’t seem too logical either. That wasn’t the way she went about things. It didn’t make any sense.

The third thought, at last, made sense. Moira or a maid had left the door open and the light on by mistake. He decided to kill the light and shut the door.

He opened the door a few more inches so that he could reach the light switch.

Then he saw them.

And froze.

There was sight, and there was recognition, and then there was disbelief. His eyes stared blankly ahead as he watched a scene that made no sense to him at all.

He could have reacted in either of two ways. He could have backed away, very quietly, possibly drawing the door shut as he did so.

Or he could have charged into the room, raising hell as he did so, and causing quite a stir.

He did neither of these things.

Instead he stood right where he was and watched. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing but he went right on watching anyhow. It was a new one on him. He held his breath for several seconds, then let it out.

And went right on staring. This is what he saw:

A girl with red hair lay on her back in the center of the bed. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. She was breathing raggedly. From time to time her body gave a twist of pleasant excitement.

Another person crouched over her. The other person was kissing her breast now while fondling Moira elsewhere.

The other person was a girl.

A very pretty girl. A girl with short black hair and tiny rosebud breasts. A girl with mannish hips.

A girl.

Johnny was staggered. He went on watching as the girl began planting a row of kisses on Moira’s body just as he himself had done so many times, to Moira and to many other women. It was normal for a man to kiss a woman like that. But when a girl did that it wasn’t normal at all. It was sick and twisted.

It was also happening before his eyes.

The girl kissed lower.

She took a long time finding what she was looking for, and all the while Moira’s excitement grew visibly.

And then, amazingly, the brunette was reversing her position on the bed. And then Moira did something Johnny didn’t believe. She drew the girl down to her.

Johnny gasped.

And Moira duplicated the actions of the brunette. They went on and on and on.

I wish I had a camera, Johnny thought.

He sighed. One of those precious moments preserved and immortalized on film would be a damned annuity. Moira had said that interior decorators weren’t supposed to be eccentric, hadn’t she?

Well, this was eccentric enough. And she would pay through the nose until the day she died to keep that kind of picture out of circulation.

Because this was a pretty eccentric taste. And taste was precisely the word for it.

They kept kissing, and Johnny was going out of his mind. Maybe it was never going to end, he thought. Maybe they would just plain go on forever. It was crazy, and it was strangely terrifying and it was sickening. But it was sure as hell happening, and there was no way of getting around it.

In a way, he thought, it explained a lot of things. Moira wanted to be independent from men, and at the same time she needed a lot of sex. So she bought her men and stayed independent that way. But that wasn’t enough.

There was only one real way to stay independent from men. It was simple enough. You gave up men and tried women instead. And that was just what she was doing.

It seemed to be working.

Johnny felt like a fifth wheel. More than that, he felt like a third wheel on a two-wheel bicycle. He wanted to leave but couldn’t.

Then, finally, they were done. They fell apart, exhausted, and Johnny slipped away from the door without being seen, closing it a few inches first so that no one else could look in. He went to his own room next door, took out his key and went inside. He felt sick to his stomach.

Moira didn’t want him again. She barely wanted him around at all, and it wasn’t hard for Johnny to figure out why. She and the brunette were together almost constantly. They gambled together, but now Moira wasn’t throwing her money away quite so recklessly. They ate together and they drank together. They went to shows together. Johnny Wells was left out in the cold, and that suited him fine.

He didn’t want to have anything to do with her if he could help it. He didn’t even want to ride back to New York with her. She didn’t want him and he didn’t want her and to hell with it.

So he went to her.

“I think I’ll go back a day early,” he said. “If it’s okay with you.”

“Do what you like,” she said. “I may stick around an extra week. I’m having a ball, even if I am taking a licking.”

She certainly picked the right words, he thought.

“Well,” he said, “how about my ticket?”

“I bought one-way tickets.”

“Want to give me money, then?”

“Buy your own ticket,” she snapped. “I’ll take care of your bill and that’s all. You’ve milked me for enough dough already, sonny boy. From here on you can fend for yourself.”

It was a complete switch. He could have put up a fight but he didn’t even bother. The plane fare would set him back less than two hundred bucks and it was worth it to him to avoid an argument. She’d changed from an independent woman who paid for her men to a militant dyke who didn’t want anything to do with them. Well, the hell with her.

He packed and caught a plane that landed at Idlewild. He went back to his room at the Ruskin and deposited a pile of dough when his bank opened the next morning. He was free now, out on his own hook again. He decided to stick with free-lancing. A permanent hook-up was a pain in the neck even for two weeks. He tried to imagine living with a broad like Moira for a year. Or one who was worse, for that matter. It would be hell on earth and who needed it?

For two weeks he didn’t go near a woman. It was a tremendous switch for him, a brand-new approach to the whole concept of a vacation. He lived at the Ruskin, went to concerts and shows, sat in the park and read books. He wandered around the city and stayed away from the bars on Lexington.

What the hell, he could afford it. He had more money than he could spend for a while and he didn’t need to bang his head off to get his hands on more. He wasn’t the kind of man who went through money like a fish out of water anyhow. He spent a lot certainly, but that was because he earned a lot. His expenditures were never as high as his income.

He wasn’t a compulsive spender or a compulsive gambler. And he deserved a vacation. So for those two weeks he ate well, took life easy, did a lot of loafing and a lot of wandering. It was a kick.

He thought quite a bit about Moira during those two weeks. Sometimes he had to laugh. He would look at the whole situation objectively and it would seem hysterically funny to him. The whole idea of a woman paying a guy to be on hand to make love to her and then taking up with a dyke was a pretty hilarious notion. You had to laugh when you thought about it. What the hell — it was funny.

Other times it wasn’t so funny.

Because during those other times he would think that Moira had taken up with the dark-haired dyke because the girl made love better than he did. That was ridiculous, of course — Moira’s problem was psychological, not physical. He could have been Adonis himself and she still would have shown a preference sooner or later for the girl’s style of lovemaking.

So it wasn’t his fault. But still it was galling. He was something of an expert in his field. One session with him ought to turn a devout lesbian into a heterosexual. Instead it had worked the other way around and it was annoying. He had trouble thinking about it without getting more than a trifle angry.

He had the weird feeling that he was coming to some sort of a division in the road. That was one reason he had taken the vacation, such as it was. He wanted to leave himself some good thinking time. He had to be able to see where he was and what the hell he was going to do next.

Where was he?

In a sense he was rich. His two bank accounts totalled almost seven thousand dollars — which was pretty damned high by 99th Street standards. Yet you could look at it another way. Moira probably dropped more than that in a bad day at the roulette wheel. So he wasn’t so rich after all.

Well, what did he want? He’d already managed to learn that he didn’t want a permanent hookup with a woman. That would only drive him nuts. Nor did he want to keep free-lancing, socking more and more money away, until he was rich. What would he do then? Sit around and rot?

There were moments and even hours when he envied the suckers with their nice steady jobs. They had something to do every day, something that interested them, while he had nothing but time on his hands and no real future.

The rest of the time he gave himself mental kicks in the head and asked himself if he was out of his mind or what. He had money to burn, easy work and simple hours. What was wrong with him? Did he want to tie a ball and chain around his neck?

To hell with it, he thought. He’d just keep on the way he was. He was doing a lot of reading, seeing shows, eating well. He was making money. Hell, he was enjoying himself, wasn’t he? Of course he was. So why kick a winner in the head?

Maybe I’ve been reading too much, he thought. Maybe I’m getting a little bit nuts. Maybe the philosophy and psychology and history and literature is too much for my head to take. Maybe I’m looking around corners for little men who aren’t there.

He talked to himself like that but it didn’t work. Not quite.

Because the nagging feeling persisted that he was missing something that was necessary to the full enjoyment of life. He couldn’t help feeling that there was a vacuum-like quality to his life as it stood and he didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. It was a pain in the neck, he thought angrily. If you just got to feeling rotten when you were a success, what was the point in trying at all?

There were even times when he remembered the days of poverty on the upper west side with something approaching nostalgia. Then he would think about cockroaches and cramped filthy quarters and not enough to eat and he would realize that the good old days hadn’t been so good at all.

Then why did they seem good?

Maybe I was alive then, he would think. Maybe I was more of a human being and less of a machine. But was I a human being then? I never read a book or thought a human thought. I didn’t live like a human being. I lived like an animal. Was I actually more human then?

It didn’t make sense.

Nothing made sense.

If there was only a way to turn your mind off, he thought. To just plain close your eyes tight and not think about anything at all. Maybe that would be the best bet. But it had taken him a hell of a long time to learn how to think.

How did he learn to stop thinking?

It was confusing as all hell.

He went back to work on a Wednesday evening. He had dinner alone, then dressed in his brown tweed suit, white shirt with tab collar, brown foulard tie, and Scotch grain brown loafers. He told a cab driver to take him to Lexington and 58th Street and walked into the Pickled Poodle feeling like a prostitute at the conclusion of her period.

Back to work.

Two hours and forty-three minutes later he was in bed with a forty-year-old woman named Margaret Pennington who had a husband, but the husband was out of town and Mrs. Pennington was consequently on the town. They made a rather dispirited sort of love in Mrs. Pennington’s nuptial chamber and, while Mrs. Pennington seemed to be going out of her mind over the way things were proceeding, Johnny couldn’t have cared less. It was a complete bore from start to finish, and he made sure the finish came as quickly as possible.

An hour later she wanted to play games again.

The thought kind of nauseated him but he wanted to give her her money’s worth. What the hell, she was paying for it.

But something was going wrong.

She was getting excited, all right. If she got much more excited she would go through the roof, which would be fine. But he wasn’t getting excited.

The spirit was willing. But the flesh wasn’t.

This was something which had never happened before. There had been many times when he’d had no interest in making love. There had been many times when he had not enjoyed the process in the least for one reason or another, either because the woman was unappealing or because he was tired or because the woman was about as much fun as a sweaty pillow. This was something else.

Something brand new.

It didn’t take long for him to realize that nothing was going to happen. His first reaction was simple enough. He had to cover himself.

“Margaret,” he said, tender as all hell, “I don’t think I’ll be able to make love to you a second time tonight.”

This displeased her.

“I certainly want to,” he lied. “I want to very much. But I’m afraid I can’t. You see—” he grinned sadly “—you really tired me out. I guess I’m not used to women like you, Margaret. You’re a lot of woman.”

This was the most phenomenal mis-statement of recorded time but it worked magnificently. Since nobody had told Mrs. Pennington she was a lot of woman since the opening of the Panama Canal, she was more pleased than she would have been if he had taken her an even dozen times. She told him at least fourteen times to think nothing of it, it couldn’t be helped, and at any rate their one experience was more than satisfactory.

To hell with you, he thought. You probably haven’t done it twice in one night since they shot Lincoln. So you’ve got nothing to gripe about.

When he left she gave him one hundred and seventy-two dollars, which struck him as an unlikely sum but certainly more than sufficient. He was pleased by the payment but roundly disturbed by his own performance, or lack thereof. Despite what he’d said to old Margaret, she hadn’t taken anything out of him but desire. Making love to any woman twice in one night was nothing for him. And to top it off, he hadn’t had any woman in better than two weeks.

So what was wrong?

It happened again the night after that. This was worse, because it happened the first time and he certainly couldn’t plead exhaustion. Nor could he rationalize his failure to himself. The woman involved was not unappealing by a long shot. She was a neat little number cheating on her husband and she had a body that couldn’t have been better.

But nothing happened.

Again he covered himself, this time in a different way. “Darling,” he warbled, “you must get bored with the usual run of lovemaking. I want to make love to you in a new and different way.”

She was all for it. She said something properly silly about variety being the spice of life and he gave her enough spice to fill a few hundred pepper mills. He satisfied her skillfully without revealing his impotence.

This may have satisfied her but it sure as hell didn’t satisfy him. It kept him from sleeping that night. He tossed and turned in his own bed all night long, and when he finally did drift off to a hazy sort of sleep it was beset by continual nightmares. He woke up exhausted, feeling as though he’d just finished running twenty miles with an eighty-pound albatross around his neck.

Bad.

Very bad.

Terrible.

He couldn’t figure it out. It couldn’t be that he was too old. Hell, he’d just turned all of eighteen. No matter how much loving-around you did, you didn’t get too old for it at age eighteen. It was senseless.

What was he supposed to do? Travel? Take a vacation? He’d just done both of those things and now he was up the creek in a lead canoe. An impotent gigolo. You didn’t get rich that way.

So what was he supposed to do?

He went to the library and read up on impotence. All he could find was that it was almost exclusively psychological, which was something he had already figured out.