Lover

Chapter Nine

He was sitting in a bar on Lexington Avenue in the fifties and he was drinking cognac. He wasn’t sure just what day of the week it was and he didn’t particularly care. He was Johnny Wells and he lived at the Hotel Ruskin and that was all he cared about. Anything else was immaterial.

He was Johnny Wells and he was wearing a gray sharkskin suit with white shirt and pearl-gray tie and expensive black shoes, and he was drinking cognac.

He was remembering a girl named Linda.

She was dead, of course. Dead trying to eradicate from her body the seed some other man had planted within her. And he was alone, and this fact made many things unnecessary.

It made the apartment on Sullivan Street unnecessary, because he had known at once that he could no longer live there, not with her gone. The apartment, a pleasant place in a pleasant area that had been their love nest, would be hell without her. It was the perfect place for a man and a woman in love, but it was no place at all for a man alone.

When the first bat ended, when he woke up one morning with a hangover so massive and all-consuming that he thought for the first hour of it that he was wearing somebody else’s head, he had managed to get back to the apartment on Sullivan Street. He washed up as best as he could and shaved himself without cutting up his face too badly. He dressed, packed the few things he wanted to take with him, and caught a cab to the bank. He drew out a few hundred dollars and took another cab to the Ruskin.

They were kind enough to take him back. His old room had been rented but they gave him another just as good and he went into it and took another bath and then went to sleep. He went to sleep. He went out later that day and bought a bottle of cognac at a liquor store. He took it to bed with him.

Now two more months had passed. He had never even so much as considered returning to his job writing copy for Craig, Harry and Bourke. The job belonged to another world, a world where Linda was alive and in love with him. He no longer inhabited that world. The job was part of the goal, the big, happy, beautiful goal which included Linda and their children and the house overlooking the Hudson and the Cadillac three blocks long.

Now there were no more goals.

And no more dreams.

Only Johnny Wells, alone.

And for Johnny Wells alone there was no point in breaking your hump writing copy for a yard a week with a chance for advancement when you could bust your hump half as hard for ten times the dough taking care of widows and divorcees and other men’s wives. So it didn’t take him long to drift back to the bars on Lexington. He did this automatically. One day the money ran out, and he didn’t feel like further depleting his bank account, and that night he went to a bar whose name he since forgot and managed to get himself picked up by a sloppy-breasted woman with incongruously blonde hair. The hair was from a bottle and the woman was strictly from hunger, but Johnny had a job to do and he acquitted himself nobly. He left the woman’s apartment with the memory of her loose skin under his hands and with a crisp hundred dollar bill in his billfold. He worked a week to earn that much at Craig, Harry and Bourke. Now he was making that much in a night again.

He sipped his cognac and waited for something to happen. In the days when he was hustling he didn’t wait for things to happen. He spotted a likely prospect and worked for his money.

Now he didn’t care enough to try too hard. Besides, he was drinking a little bit more than usual and the cognac was beginning to reach him. He was content to simply sit and drink until something came his way. And if nothing did come his way, well, that was all right too. He didn’t really care that much. He wasn’t going to starve to death. He could afford to bide his time.

He felt very old and very tired. Often he tried to remind himself that he was all of eighteen years old but he could never really believe it. Or was he eighteen? It seemed to him that he’d hit another birthday somewhere along the way, that he was in fact nineteen, but he had trouble keeping track.

It didn’t really matter. As far as he could tell, he was neither eighteen nor nineteen. He felt at least forty, sometimes older. In eighteen or nineteen years — did it matter which? — he had done more living than most men did in a lifetime. And it was beginning to show.

He finished his cognac and signaled for a refill. It was funny, he thought. He’d originally switched to cognac as a steady drink for three reasons. One — he liked the taste. Two — it was something a gentleman could drink. And three — he could nurse a drink for an hour and never get drunk.

Funny.

Nowadays he drank his cognac without really tasting it. And the gentleman bit certainly didn’t matter — he had other more important things to worry about than his boyish concept of what a gentleman was and what a gentleman did and all nonsensical manure like that.

And the third reason certainly didn’t apply. He didn’t nurse his drinks any more. He drank them right down, and he got drunk on them.

Funny.

He decided he wanted a cigarette. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette case, reached in again and got his silver lighter. He took a cigarette from the case and put it to his lips, then flicked the lighter. It lit on the first try, as it always did, and he took the light and drew smoke into his lungs. It tasted foul. Everything did lately.

“Want to hold the light, sweetie?”

He turned and looked at her.

She wasn’t bad, was in fact better than he was used to. She was in her thirties but that was to be expected — girls in their twenties got all the romance they wanted without paying for it. This one was holding up well. She had jet black hair swept back into a bun and her skin was firm and pinkish. She still had a shape, too — a nice pair of boobs, unless they were phonies, and a trim waist. He couldn’t see her legs and didn’t know whether they were good or not.

He lit her cigarette.

“Thanks,” she said. “Nice night, huh?”

“Very nice.”

“The night is nice and so are you. Busy tonight, honey? Or can we get together?”

Most of them didn’t talk like this one. Most of them were subtle as all hell, while this one had half the subtlety of an atomic weapon. He started to resent her, then changed his mind. In a way her bluntness was refreshing. Hell, she knew the score and so did he. Why not call a shovel a shovel?

“Sure,” he said. “I guess we can get together.”

“It has to be tonight,” she went on. “There’s a very special party tonight.”

There was always a very special party.

“A highly unusual party,” she went on. “You’ve probably never been to one like it.”

“I’ve been to lots of parties,” he said.

“Ever been to an orgy?”

That one stopped him. He stared at her, and his expression must have been a riot, because she burst out into hysterical laughter. “Oh, come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this inverted whorehouse. I’ll tell you about it outside. I think you may kind of like it.”

They went out onto the street. It was cold out and he caught them a cab. They got into the back seat. She gave the driver an address on Park Avenue in the Nineties and curled into his arms. He played his role properly, taking her in his arms, kissing her, holding her close.

Suddenly she took one of his hands and placed it under her skirt. “That’s right,” she said, “that’s where I like to be held.”

They rode three blocks in silence while she made appropriate purring noises to indicate her approval.

“A wild group of people,” she explained. “All of us rich and all of as bored, like it says in the peepshow magazines. Every once in a while we have a meeting and show some movies. Ever seen a movie?”

“I see lots of movies.”

“I mean stag movies.”

“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen one.”

“They’re fun,” she told him. “Not as much fun as doing it yourself, of course. That’s the most fun of all. Nothing quite like it. But the pictures are fun themselves. They sort of set the stage, get a person in the mood.”

“You feel as though you’re in the mood already,” he said to her.

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was born that way. But to get back to the picture. This one guy has a brownstone uptown, where we’re going. There’ll be four couples there. Another woman like me — Park Avenue matrons with time on our hands and money to burn is the way the magazines would put it. And two guys, the guy who owns the house and another like him. There’ll be a nice little call girl for each of the guys and another gigolo for the other gal and you for me. Eight all told.”

“I got a question,” he said.

“Go on.”

“Why don’t you and the two guys go to it and save money?”

“Because they’re our husbands. We need a little variety once in a while, sweetie.”

That shut him up. She went on to explain the set-up — there were four love seats in the living room, and each couple had a love seat, and they sat on them during the movie. Sat was a euphemism — they did whatever they wanted to do.

Then, when the movie ended, they paired off and went somewhere or simply stayed in the living room and kept at it. It didn’t make too much difference.

“Sound okay?”

“I suppose so,” he said.

“Any questions?”

“Yeah. One.”

“Go on.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“A lot of fun,” she said. “The joy of having me a few dozen times. Need more?”

“Yeah.”

“Mercenary,” she said. “There’s also a quick five hundred bucks in it for you. Good enough?”

“Fine,” he said.

The living room took up most of the first floor of the brownstone town house. The other “couples” were all on hand when Johnny arrived with the woman, whose name turned out to be Sheila Chase. Her husband, Harvey Chase, owned the brownstone. He had a little trollop on his arm with curly brown hair and mammoth mammaries. Another man, introduced as Max Turner, was escorting a light-skinned Negro prostitute with breasts just as large as those of the little trollop on Chase’s arm.

Turner’s wife Gloria was standing beside a young man whom Johnny had no trouble identifying as a comrade-in-arms. The kid’s name was Lance and he worked the same bars as Johnny.

It was a weird scene if ever there was one. First Max Turner made a little speech, and then everybody took off his or her clothes and stood around naked and unashamed. It gave Johnny a good chance to have a long look at the body of the woman he was going to be with.

She wasn’t bad at all. Happily, her boobs were all hers. They had a slight sag to them but nothing any man in his right mind would complain about. And her legs were very good indeed. She had stretch marks on her abdomen that were a sign that she had borne children at one time or other. That sort of bothered Johnny. He couldn’t quite see her as the perfect mother. The picture didn’t fit.

But he wasn’t complaining. Five hundred dollars was more than adequate for one night’s work. And the work might even turn out to be enjoyable. There was no way to say for sure one way or the other, but it might be interesting.

He had never seen a stag movie before. Vicarious sex never particularly appealed to him, perhaps because he had had so much first-hand experience along those lines. The only thing similar to watching a stag movie in his experience was when he had watched the lesbian make love to Moira in the hotel room in Las Vegas.

And that hadn’t excited him. Instead it had nauseated him, and he had had to throw up as soon as it was over.

Sure. But maybe this would be different. He would have to wait and find out.

Sheila Chase sat down on one of the velvet love seats and he took his seat beside her. The lights went out. A silver screen rolled down from the ceiling and he stared hard at it, waiting for something to happen. He heard Sheila’s ragged breathing at his side; it wasn’t at all hard to see that she found such movies extremely exciting.

Well, maybe he’d get a kick too. The cognac was still working in his head and he felt almost drunk but not too drunk to function properly. He dropped an arm over her shoulder and let his hand cup her breast. It was very large and he liked the feel of it against his palm. He held it and watched the screen.

The picture began.

Title Card: HOT STUFF.

The motion picture is set in the great outdoors. It opens with a long shot of a scene somewhere out in the country, possibly shot in upper New York State, possibly in some part of California where most movies and starlets are made. The rural scene pans over a stretch of open field to the shore of a small lake.

Long shot of a girl walking across the field to the lakeshore. She is wearing a man’s flannel shirt open at the neck and a pair of tight levis. The camera follows her to the water’s edge, concentrating on her buttocks. They are plump, and she is walking in a burlesque of the typical trollop’s strut.

At the edge of the water she stops and turns to face the camera. She smiles.

Subtitle: I’M HOT. I THINK I’LL TAKE A SWIM.

This said, the girl begins to undress. She opens the buttons on the shirt one at a time to reveal breasts which the loose shirt had kept well hidden up to this point. The camera dollies in for a close-up of her breasts. She drops the shirt to the ground.

Her hands play with her breasts. The camera watches.

Subtitle: I WISH SOMEBODY WOULD DO THIS FOR ME.

The camera moves back. The star of this epic now undoes the belt of her denim slacks, then unzips them and peels them off. She pirouettes for the camera in order to expose all her charms to its omniscient eye.

The camera focuses on her buttocks. She turns again. The camera pans her body from her feet to her waist.

Then the girl plunges into the water. She begins to swim lazily about as the camera watches from the shore.

Now a man comes into view.

He does not notice the girl, nor does he take any note of the girl’s clothing. Instead he simply walks to the lakeshore, then turns as the girl did to face the camera. He is a tall, dark, good-looking man with long and neatly-combed black hair. He smiles at the camera.

Subtitle: HO HUM. THINK I’LL TAKE A SWIM.

The man begins to undress. He is wearing a skintight tee shirt which he peels off over his head and throws to the ground. He has a good suntan, as if he is in the habit of swimming like this every day of the week. His chest is hard and taut, his arms well-muscled.

The camera moves to one side and the man again faces it, so that his side is to the water.

Shot of the girl’s face. She is crouching in the water so that only her face is visible. She is smiling hugely, her eyes wide. It is obvious that she sees the man and likes what she is looking at.

Shot of the man as he strips quickly.

Shot of the man’s face.

Subtitle: WISH I HAD A WOMAN

The girl swims in toward shore. She reaches the shore and climbs up on the bank, smiling at the man.

Shot of the man. He is obviously very pleased that the girl has arrived.

Shot of girl’s face again.

Subtitle: DO YOU LIKE ME?

Shot of man, nodding his head YES.

Shot of girl. The camera pans her body. She touches herself, walks toward the man. He reaches out and places his hands on her breasts. He begins to fondle her and the camera closes in.

Johnny was perspiring.

He hadn’t expected this. Viewed from a distance, the picture was crude and stupid. It shouldn’t be exciting, not to a man who’d literally had more women than he could count. It should be boring from start to finish.

It wasn’t.

On the contrary. He wasn’t sure why this was possible.

It certainly wasn’t that the woman was pretty. She wasn’t bad, but he had a better-looking woman on the couch next to him. And he’d made love to many better-looking women in his time.

He guessed that it must be the idea of watching something forbidden. Something like that, maybe. It was hard to tell, but that was his guess.

Sheila moved beside him.

He saw her face in the half-light. Her mouth was tense with desire and beads of perspiration dotted her forehead. He could smell her as well. She used a great quantity of a very expensive perfume but that wasn’t all he smelled.

He smelled her.

“Johnny—”

“Come here, baby.”

She came to him and he drew her down, pressed his face between her breasts. For a moment it was as if there were two Johnny Wells, one of them on the couch with Sheila Chase and the other standing off at a distance watching and snickering at him. The standing-off one had plenty to snicker at, he had to admit.

Here he was, an experienced guy, a guy who’d been around plenty. Here he was lying on a love seat with another man’s wife while the other man was with a cuddly little call girl. Here he was watching a picture of two people making it and getting interested himself.

Well, what of it?

He didn’t care about a lot of things now. He didn’t care who or what Sheila Chase happened to be. He cared only that she also happened to be a woman, and that at the moment he needed a woman, and that she was handy.

That was plenty.

So he bit her and heard her cry with pain and passion both at once.

“Johnny—”

He looked at her.

“The line from the picture,” she moaned. “The line the girl says to him right before they do it.”

He waited.

She quoted the line. It had been strange to see those words in print on the screen, and it was even stranger to hear them come tumbling from her lips.

He gave her just what she asked for.

On the screen, the man and the woman finished their first bout of lovemaking. The man is lying flat on his back, scratching himself with one hand. The woman is lying on her side, looking down at him.

Subtitle: LET’S DO IT AGAIN.

They both stand up. The camera moves for a side angle as the woman bends down, finally crouching on her hands and knees.

The man moves behind her.

Shot of woman’s face, passionate.

Subtitle: NOW!

Shot of the man’s face, smiling hugely.

The man does it to her.

Finally the man and woman finish.

“I’m ready again,” Sheila said.

“You’re always ready.”

“I’m burning up. But it’s the damnedest thing I don’t want to stop watching the picture.”

“Neither do I.”

She was grinning. “I told you it was exciting,” she said. “You didn’t think it would be. But it is. It’s exciting as all hell.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You too?”

“Uh-huh.”

She sighed. “And now I want to make love. I want to keep watching the picture, but I also want to make love. Two drives, each in a different direction. Profound, huh?”

“Sure.”

He knew what she meant. He had thought that one session on the love seat with her would take his mind off sex for a while, but the picture was having too great an effect upon him. Once again he was caught up with desire for her. And the picture was still exciting. He didn’t want to take his eyes off it if he could help it.

“I have an idea,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I want to watch the picture,” she said, “and I want to make love.”

“How?”

“You won’t be able to see the picture,” she told him. “I will, but you won’t. I guess that’s the price you pay in return for the five hundred dollars. See what I mean?”

He saw what she meant.

“It won’t be too great a sacrifice,” she said. “You’ve seen most of the movie already. Now I want you to kiss me while I watch the rest of it.”

“I get it.”

“You know what I want you to do?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And it’s fair, isn’t it? I don’t want you to miss the show but there’s no help for it. I’m paying you, after all. Lots of money. Five hundred dollars.”

“I understand.”

The man and the woman had finished, and they were now both cavorting in the water. The camera examined them in the distance but there was not much to see.

Then a young girl came into camera range. Now the young girl is undressing and the camera is watching her. She is a very lovely young girl and seems to be very young. She wears no makeup and her breasts are small.

She is nude now and the camera is busy examining her body.

Shot of the faces of the man and the woman. They are looking at the girl and they seem interested.

Shot of man’s face alone.

Subtitle: SHE’S A PRETTY ONE.

Shot of woman’s face.

Subtitle: WE COULD HAVE FUN WITH HER.

The two of them swim madly for shore. They clamber up on the bank and run for her.

Shot of the girl. She does not seem to know what to do. The expression on her face says that she is frightened but she makes no move to run away.

Shot of man’s face.

Subtitle: NOW WE’VE GOT YOU!

The man grabs the girl from behind and holds her around the waist. She struggles but cannot get away. The woman moves in front of the girl and takes the girl’s breasts in her hands.

Shot of woman’s face.

Subtitle: I’M GOING TO HAVE FUN WITH HER.

The woman suits her actions to her words.

The camera has a good time watching this most unusual display.

Shot of man’s face.

Subtitle: IT’S MY TURN NOW.

The man and the woman succeed in getting the unwilling girl down upon the ground.

The man falls upon the girl and begins to make love to her.

The camera watches.

He was walking.

It was night, a very black night, and he was walking. Five fresh hundred dollar bills were in his wallet. They had not been there before.

They were his to keep. They were his in reward for having participated in the most sickening display of promiscuity he had ever heard about, not to say had anything to do with. They were his, and he had worked hard for them.

He wanted a drink.

The movie ended, and that was just a signal for the rest of the festivities to begin. The festivities had been odd ones. Someone had given him something to drink, something which contained a powerful stimulant, and the stimulant had gotten him through the evening in one piece.

In the course of the evening he had made love, not just to Sheila, but to every woman around at least once. He had made love in manners not even he had had any familiarity with. He had made love in ways that were sickening and disgusting, but he had done everything they had wanted him to do.

Now he was exhausted.

He walked down Fifth Avenue alongside of the park. He thought how late it was and wondered why he didn’t hop into a cab and go home. Home? The hotel, then. He didn’t have a home. The Ruskin was the best substitute available.

A cab cruised hopefully by but he didn’t bother to hail it. He kept walking.

Because it occurred to him that there was no point in hurrying to get home. No point at all. What was there when he got there? Just a bottle and a bed — cognac to drink and a bed to curl up and sack out in. That was incentive enough generally, but after what he had been through it was not incentive enough.

Nothing was.

He had arrived. He was a real gigolo now, reputation established, good clothes, money in the bank, the manners of a gentleman.

A gigolo.

And what the hell good was that? For that matter, what the hell good was he? What the hell good was Johnny Wells? The answer was simple.

No good.

No good at all.

I ought to kill myself, he thought. Not because my problems are too much for me. Not because I’m desperately unhappy. Just because there is no point in going on. Just because I’m bored stiff and I’m going to be bored stiff for the rest of my life. How many years left? Twenty or thirty or forty or fifty or sixty?

Too many.

Too many years.

And the years would all be the same. The same damn routine going on and on forever. Oh he could relax now and then, take things easy. He could travel or knock off for awhile, or something. There were loads of things he could do.

They all added up to nothing.

A big fat nothing.

And suddenly he realized he was only nineteen years old... that was it, he remembered; nineteen, definitely... and his life was ended. He had pulled himself up out of a gutter and made something of himself, just once. Oh, not during his gigolo period, which had returned, but during those brief days when he had known a great deal of innocent peace, hard work, simple happiness with Linda. He had put the lie to those who said teen-agers could never make a go of marriage. He had, and Linda had, and now neither of them were alive any more. She was dead, and he wasn’t a man any more, he was simply a nineteen-year-old kid who had been living way over his head in a world full of knees in the groin and fingers in the eyes. Nothing... he was reduced to nothing!

Nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to see. Nothing at all — and that, all in all, was the reason he ought to kill himself. It was simply that there was nothing left to live for, and wasn’t that reason enough?

No, it wasn’t.

Because there was nothing to die for, either. Right away, when Linda died, he could have killed himself. Then there might have been a point to it, a reason for it.

But he hadn’t had the guts then. And now there was less point to dying than there was to living. So he might as well go on, because there was nothing else to do.

When another cab came by he hailed it and hopped into the back seat. He tried to relax while the cab headed for the Ruskin, tried not to think about Sheila Chase or her sickening husband or anybody else at the party.

It was hard forgetting them.

It wasn’t any easier back at the Ruskin. But at least he had the cognac. It let him forget a great many things.

He drank himself to sleep.