Sin Hellcat

Two

If Helen had been waiting for me, preferably nervous and dynamically concerned, I could at least have permitted myself the luxury of delicious guilt feelings. But such luck was not to be mine. The train let me off and the chrome-plated ranch wagon was waiting for me, emptily metallic. I turned a key in it and drove along tree-lined streets to our little hate-nest among the crab grass. I buried the car in the carport — garages are sadly out of style; all that space to waste on cars that don’t fit in them anyway — and I walked around to look at the outside of our deluxe split-level colonial.

There is something reassuringly schizoid about a split-level to begin with. Ours looks as though it couldn’t possibly continue to exist if the various floors were level all across the board. The imbalance of its design is essential if it’s going to survive all the concentrated imbalance of the people who live in it. But when you take this split-level and make it colonial as well — colonial, for the love of the lord — well, the result is nice to visit, but wouldn’t you just hate to live there?

The other car, Detroit’s most recent attempt to barrelhouse into the compact field, was missing. It stood to reason that Helen was missing as well. She never goes anywhere without the car — in fact I was once thinking of buying her a bicycle to get into the house from the carport — and by extension the car never goes anywhere without her. I rang the bell anyway, sort of for the hell of it. If a doorbell rings and there’s nobody in the house, did it really ring? It really rang. I heard it. Then I opened the door with my key and went inside.

Experience told me to go first to the kitchen. It’s an electric kitchen, of course. Electric range, electric icebox, electric garbage disposal, electric washing machine, electric dishwasher, electric frying pan, electric sink, electric pop-up toaster. The sad thing is that if you put your head in the oven you can’t turn on the gas. You can only turn on the electricity. Shocking, but harmless.

The kitchen had a pegboard. It came with the kitchen, of course, and it is a huge flattened-out cork shaped like a kidney where husbands and wives leave notes for each other. A last-ditch attempt at eliminating conversation forever from the domestic scene. I looked at the pegboard and there, of course, was a note from Helen.

Harv — it began, quaintly enough. Couldn’t wait dinner for you. The girls are playing at Betty’s tonight. You know the number if something comes up. Now what in the world could come up? I pushed onward. There’s a teevee dinner in the fridge. Just pop it on the stove and eat hearty. The note was unsigned but I had a fairly sound idea who had written it.

I opened the fridge and stared thoughtfully at the teevee dinner. It was a Dexter Frozen Dinner. A Square Deal on a Square Meal, I thought. And just how square could you get? It was unsettling. I was selling my own wife.

I took out the teevee dinner, the Dexter Frozen Dinner thoughtfully provided by Harvey Christopher’s Frozen Wife. I put it on the electric range and turned the dial. The burner unit glowed like neon. I looked at Dexter’s creation — pieces of unhappy chicken swimming with leaden wings through a sea of à la king. I watched the green peas in one section of the aluminum foil container grow slowly warm. The frozen French fries thawed and heated.

When the chicken bubbled the dish was prepared. Scientific eating. Scientific cooking. I took the container — dishes are a waste of time, of course, even with an electric dishwasher to care for them, and besides you can only get them in boxes of soap, and soap makes too many suds and is harmful to your new automatic, and — I took the container into the family-style living room carpeted protectively from wall to wall to hide the bad job they’d done on the floor, and I sat down in a chair no more comfortable than it looked. I placed the container on the arm of the chair, then flicked the remote switch that clued in the television set to the fact that someone, by God, was eating a teevee dinner, and while the set woke up and came to life I plunged a fork into the chicken mess and brought it to my mouth. I chewed it — it wasn’t really necessary, because the Dexterino people sort of chew the food for you, scientifically, of course, as an unbeatable aid to digestion. A western was happening on the screen. I studied it for a moment, pausing before attempting another forkful of Dexter’s Death Warmed Over.

And I thought about Jodi, and bed with Jodi, and Jodi’s happy apartment on Lexington in the very heart of Madcap Manhattan. Jodi’s apartment was not schizoid. It didn’t even have a sunken living room. It was all on one level, as, for that matter, was Jodi.

And something happened. I reached for the remote switch and killed the television set in the middle of a howdy. I stood up, slowly but quite firmly, and I carried the Dexter’s Frozen Tundra to the bathroom.

The toilet wasn’t electric but it tried. I poured the teevee dinner into it. There was no chain to pull, no handle to yank. There was instead a pedal on the floor. I trod lightly upon the pedal and the toilet gurgled pleasantly at me while Dexter’s Frozen Folderol disappeared to wherever bad food goes when it dies.

I had a shaker of martinis mixed before I remembered that I didn’t really like martinis. I poured them down the toilet and pedaled the pedal. It was damned enjoyable. Then I looked for the Scotch, and we were out of it. I started for the carport, stopped suddenly, and returned to the kitchen. I scrawled a note for Helen Hel — it began. Went out for Scotch. Couldn’t wait until you got home. I didn’t sign it, because I figured she would know who it was from.

Then I got into the ranch wagon and pointed it at Manhattan. I didn’t really have to do much more than that. The car knew the way. I pointed it, and I let it drive, which it did very well with its automatic transmission and its power steering and its power brakes and its power windows and power doors. And while we rode along, the car and I, I thought about Jodi some more, and about me. My mind must have been as properly primed as the car. The memories flowed easily...

It was a strange affair, if you could call it an affair. I don’t think you could. Affair means several things, and none of the things is what we had. Affair means contemporary adultery, or it means modern people having a go at it, or it means a Radcliffe girl having a mad fling before she marries a stockbroker’s son. And Jodi and I were none of these things, so what we had wasn’t really an affair, evidently.

But whatever it was, it was fine with me. We were at college, and we were young, and there is no better time nor place for falling happily and heedlessly into the hay. We were at college, and we were young, and we were not in love, and we realized this.

After the wonderful night in the wonderful hotel, after the wonderful leading up to it and the wonderful doing it and the wonderful lying there and thinking about it, there was a period of about a week during which I avoided Jodi. No, that’s not it, not quite. I didn’t avoid her like the plague, or walk away when I saw her coming, or steer clear of her favorite haunts. I simply made no attempt to seek her out. Our paths did not cross by accident and I did not cause them to cross by design.

I suppose I was shy, or embarrassed, or merely young. It was the way my mind worked at that period of my life. I had made love to Jodi, and it had been more fun than a beer-drinking contest, but it was over. Make love to her again? Hell, man, I already did! Why do it again, for God’s sake?

Fear of foreign alliances, perhaps, or fear of rejection, or just stupidity. But I went on with classes and beer and rides and assorted nonsense, and I dated a few girls and caressed their breasts. Their breasts were nice, if not quite so nice as Jodi’s. And at that stage of my life, the skirt of one girl was much the same as the skirt of another. If something was missing with those other girls I was barely conscious of it. Something was missing, of course. I didn’t get to sleep with them. But I would, in due time, and I was busy making plans.

Then I ran into Jodi. Quite literally, as a matter of fact. I was strolling down the campus oblivious to mostly everything, and so was she. I didn’t see her coming and I don’t know whether she saw me or not, but we bumped chests, always a nice way to say hello. She started to topple over and I grabbed her and hoisted her upright again and we looked deeply into one another’s eyes. I remember feeling very ashamed of myself and not knowing why.

“Harvey,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

There was not much to say, so I mulled bashfully and took her arm. “Buy you a beer,” I suggested.

“Wine,” she said.

The liquor store in the silly little town closed at dusk. “I don’t have any wine,” I said. “And it’s too late to buy any. Unless you want to go to the bar.” I left the rest unsaid. You didn’t go to the bar for anything but beer. If you had hard liquor you were a lush. If you had wine you were obviously trying too hard. So the hell with it.

“I have wine,” she said, “In my room.”

“Fine. Where will we drink it?”

“In my room.”

I thought that one over. It was against the rules, a boy and a girl in a dormitory room, but so, for that matter, was a love bout in a faraway hotel. As seems to be usual, the rules of the college had little connection with reality. But, since the fundamental rule was Don’t get caught, this being a Spartan sort of a college, and since we stood a great chance of getting caught in her room, I was a little bit worried.

“We’ll get caught,” I said.

She tossed her head, sort of, and looked every inch a queen. I mean it. There was something regal about her, something I should have been able to notice long ago. It was an air that said that she not only didn’t give a warmed-over damn for the rules but that the punishment was equally unimportant to her. A sound attitude. One that I, unfortunately, was unable to carry off.

“If they catch us,” I said, “they’ll give us the old heave-ho. We won’t graduate.”

“So what?”

“You need a diploma,” quoth I, “to be a success.”

“At what?”

I wondered at what, since I had not made up my mind just what I was going to be a success at. There was a cartoon once which summed things up — a guidance counselor studying a small boy, both counselor and boy wearing thick glasses. But Arnold, said the caption, plaintively, it’s not enough to be a genius. You have to be a genius AT something. That was I, with success instead of genius. I was majoring, theoretically, in English, which meant that I read books instead of tables. But I didn’t want to be a writer or a reader or, God save us, a professor.

“At something,” I said to Jodi.

“If you come up to my room,” she said, “and if we drink the wine there, you are going to be a success. At something. At something that’s fun.” And she stepped so close to me that I could feel her. We were smack dab in the middle of the campus, and there were probably people around, and I did not care. Her breasts bumped into me and I remembered them — in the water, in the bed, firm and lovely in my hands. She did something with her hips, sort of throwing them at me. And I remembered things that were very nice to remember.

I looked at her. She was in uniform — sweater and skirt, saddle shoes. I looked at her and sweater and skirt melted away in a dissolve no Hollywood studio could attempt to duplicate. I saw a naked Jodi in Technicolor and cinemascope. She bounced at me again and naked breasts banged into me, naked hips offered themselves.

I had nothing to say. But I had things to do. I took her arm in my arm, possessive as a papa bear, and off we went to the little dormitory room that she called home.

“The best way,” she said, “is nonchalance. We’d better not try to sneak in. If we do, somebody will see us, and we’ll look sneaky. That’s no good.”

That sounded reasonable enough.

“But if we walk in as though we have every reason in the world to be there,” she went on, “we’ll look natural enough. They’ll think we’re studying together or something.”

“We will be.”

She giggled a charming giggle. “Studying,” she mused. “It’s a shame. I mean, you ought to get a diploma for it. If you’re good enough.”

“So you think you’d be good enough?” Remember, she was less experienced than I was. Not many people could have made that statement. So here, for a change, I was the Voice of Authority, the old man on the mountain, the accomplished lecher teaching the young prodigy how to get ahead on a horizontal basis.

“Practice,” she said, “makes perfect.”

“So let’s practice.”

Her room was on the third floor of the sterile brick dormitory. She led the way and up the stairs we went. A girl met us, stopped to chat. We chatted amiably about something or other. And, incredibly, it was working. The girl noticed me, all right. And there I was, leading the lovely Jodi up the primrose stairway, and there was this girl, noticing the fact and thinking nothing of it. Nonchalance, then, was the ticket.

Then we were in the room. Jodi, happily, did not have a roommate. She barely had a room. It was the single, the room the architects had made a mistake about, the little cubicle crouched precariously across the narrow hall from the community bathroom. The room had a bed, sort of, and a dresser, and an excuse for a closet. The dresser and the closet were unnecessary for the time being. The bed was there — inviting, beckoning — and we were there — hungry, eager — and the wine was there, red and sour.

“I really would like some wine,” she said. “Unless you’re in a hurry.”

There was something strange about that line. We were there to make love, you see, and her attitude was that, while she’d like to sip Chianti and talk for a moment or two, she’d be perfectly willing to stretch out on the rack if I was in a rush. Generosity? No, more than that. Here was a girl who understood the place of woman in the total scheme of things. Here was a girl who knew the proper position of woman in the social order.

“Let’s have some wine, then.”

“We’ll have to drink it out of the bottle.”

I said that was fine, and she yanked out the cork, and she took a drink. She could drink magnificently. I watched with mute admiration while the level of wine in the bottle went steadily down. Then she passed the bottle to me. I almost wiped off the neck instinctively, the way you always do when someone hands you a bottle, but I remembered that I was going to make love to this girl in a minute or two and there didn’t seem to be much point in such health precautions. I drank, taking as much as she had taken, and passed the bottle back to her.

She finished it and heaved it at the wastebasket. It missed and struck first the wall and then the floor. It bounced twice on the floor before it cracked, and when it cracked it did not fool around. It shattered into splintered glass.

“Damn,” she said thoughtfully. “We’d better not go barefoot. Not over there, anyhow.”

She turned to me. We were sitting on the edge of that very narrow bed, and when she turned to me I took her in my arms and I kissed her. It was not one of those kisses that sent a striking bolt of passion shooting through the last atom of one’s being. It was a much more contemplative sort of kiss. She was there, and I was there too, and our mouths were together and it was nice.

Her lips parted and my tongue stole past them like a thief in the night.

The kiss was long. It was one of those slow kisses that let us think over and decide that everything was going very well indeed. The kiss ended and she stood up. She peeled the sweater over her head. She was not wearing a bra, and it was just as well, because if she had been I would have torn the damned thing off of her. She did not need a bra — it would have been like harnessing a whirlwind. The whirlwind was unharnessed and my hands reached for cool soft flesh. Her nipples were buds a-blooming.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Very nice. When you stroke them and like that. It feels good.” There was something detached about her words and about the way she said them, as if she were carefully taking stock of just what I was doing and just how good it felt. I bent down and put one of those nipples to lips and she very suddenly stopped talking. Her muscles went tense and then her body began to move with something that had to be passion.

“Let me take everything off,” she said. “All my clothes. Then we can fool around for a while and then we can do it. But I don’t want to mess my skirt.”

“Fine,” I said. It may well go down in history as the understatement of the century.

She got undressed. Rather, the skirt flowed off of her, and the panties flowed off of her, and the silly saddle shoes fell from her feet, and the socks followed them, and everything that I was looking at belonged to Jodi, and consequently to me as well.

“You like?”

A silly question.

“Now you get undressed, Harvey. I want to watch. Unless you’re bashful.”

If I was, I decided, I could get over it. I felt a wee bit self-conscious stripping my clothes off, especially the way she stared at me with a cross between curiosity and desire, but I managed.

“You like?” I asked. I had to say something.

“Mmmmmm.”

And then toppled we to the bed, as Time might put it. And then kissed we, as backward rolled sentences while whirled the mind. And then fondled we, and stroked me, and touched we, and then, whee!

“Harvey—”

I wondered what she wanted.

“Harvey, do you have a thing?”

I was lost.

“So I won’t get a baby,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Because that wouldn’t be any good. Getting a baby, I mean. Inconvenient.”

I did not have a thing. For weeks I had carried one around in my wallet, just as most college students do. But, sad to say, I had used it. Before I met Jodi. Before I got next to Jodi, anyway. And, thinking about it, I had an unhappy thought.

“Last time—”

She was right there with me. “Last time,” she said, “there was nothing to worry about. But—”

“I don’t have one.”

“Then we can’t do it.”

That was something to ponder. “We can start to,” I said thoughtfully. “And before anything happens, we can stop, and then—”

“A friend of mine did that.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“She had a baby.”

“Oh,” I said hollowly. “Then... do you want to wait while I... uh... find a drugstore?”

Alarm was an ugly black shadow across her pretty face. “That will take too long,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly wait. It would tear me apart.”

I had to admit that I couldn’t wait either. The dilemma grew. And grew. And grew.

“Harvey,” she said plaintively. “Harvey, there is a way. I... you might not like it. I mean, it’s not... some people would say it isn’t normal. If that makes a difference. But I wouldn’t get a baby that way.”

I asked her what way she meant and she told me.

Is there anyone in the world so prudish as a college boy? The young lotharic type, out to conquer the female half of the universe, is in his own weak way as puritanical as any spinster from here to Bessarabia. If they have spinsters in Bessarabia. And I was quite roundly shocked.

But I was also quite roundly ready, and it was easier to conceal the shock than the evidence of my interest in Jodi. So I reached for her, playing the scene by ear as it were, and it began.

It was her first time at that particular fun-and-games method, but she took to it like a mallard to hydrous oxide, and away we went, off into outer space. It was good, and it was fun, and Jodi’s particular brand of Scotch was chosen forever.

I spent the night with her. Ill-advised, in a way — any damned fool could have wandered into her little room and loused things up for both of us as far as the college was concerned. But I was unable to see myself tiptoeing out of the girl’s dorm at three in the morning. Nonchalance is only good for so long. Then the roof falls in on you.

So we topped the world by being a bit much in the line of nonchalance. We slept, body to body, and when we woke up the idea of her getting pregnant seemed far less important, and we risked it. Then she went off to breakfast, bringing me a very modest repast in a paper bag, and we crawled back in the sack for another go at it.

I left that dorm at high noon and no one looked at me twice.

Youth. She didn’t get pregnant from that delightful evening. And after that I was careful, very careful. And, for some reason which eluded me then but which was very important nevertheless, my conquest became a secret one. I suppose it was Jodi’s change in status from conquest to partner. We were having an affair, not playing a seduction scene. There was no need to ply her with liquor, to woo her with words of love, to con her in one perverse way or another. There was no need to do anything but ask her, and that was enough.

I was clever and conscientious. I kept up-to-date in my scholastic endeavors, such as they were. I slept alone, confining our amours to an hour here and an hour there. I worked at my books and I gave her the hours that were left, because school was important and the future, the glowing shiny chrome-plated future, it was more important. And Jodi — well, Jodi was important, too, because Jodi was a valuable outlet and a pleasant way to spend an hour here and an hour there. But Jodi was not important enough.

“It’s a shame,” she said, one afternoon on a blanket on the golf course — a common abode of lovers; no one in the history of the college ever committed the cardinal sin of playing golf there, for the love of God — “that you don’t love me. And that I don’t love you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said, dreamily, her hand doing magical things. “I don’t know, exactly. Except that I think it would be nice.”

“Love,” I said. “Nice.”

“Kind of.”

I put my hand inside her blouse and felt a nipple stiffen. I caressed and she purred. I put another hand up her skirt and she gasped. Not a gasp of surprise and not a gasp of passion but something harder to define. As if she was thrilled by the fact that I was touching her and that she was responding, and wasn’t it nice?

It was that. And the afternoon was a trip to the moon on the gossamerest of wings, and, in the words of the bard, the world moved. No sleeping bag, but you can’t have everything.

She remembered the next day. “Love,” she said.

“Love,” I said. “Moon and June. Do you know that there are only four words in the English language that rhyme with love?” I told her erroneously.

She hadn’t known that.

“Glove, dove, shove and above,” I said. “Want to write a poem? Sing a song?”

She didn’t. She wanted to be somber. “I don’t think I’ll ever fall in love,” she said. “I’d like to, kind of. But I don’t think it will ever happen to me.”

It was the regal Jodi speaking, the far-off look in the lovely eye. One did not speak when the queen spoke. One listened thoughtfully and hung on every word.

“Some women are made for love,” she said, “and some are not. I’m made for sex, I guess. Or something like that. But not for love.”

“How can you tell?”

The spell was broken the mood shattered. Wherever she had been, she was there no longer. “Let’s make love,” she said happily. “Or let’s make sex. Let’s make something, for goodness sake, and let’s do it as well as we possibly can.” Which was very well indeed...

I garaged the car, not wanting to carry the memory any further. It had carried me as far as Manhattan and that was quite far enough. Any more would be bad, because the only course for memory to follow was the course of an affair that went downhill from there in a way I did not enjoy reminiscing about. And after that there were ten more years of my life to consider, and the less I considered them, the better.

So I garaged the car and paid the man and walked into Manhattan. I don’t know what I was looking for, exactly, except that I was thirsty. The bar I found was on 47th Street between Fifth and Madison. It was late, businesswise, but the boys were still there.

I heard phrases that I didn’t want to listen to. I heard the fey patter and the unhip hipness, and I drank Vat 69 and did not talk to anybody. I was roundly bored, and the only thing that could have been more boring was the little split-personality home in Rockland County, with or without my barren witch aboard to louse things up.

The liquor was good and I drank quite a bit of it. I’d had no dinner, of course — just a mouthful of Dexter’s Deflavored Dishwater — and I still had a little of the edge from the Scotch I’d shared with Jodi. And the more I drank the more sploshed I got, and the more sploshed I got the less I wanted to spend the evening sitting in an ad man’s bar.

I left the place, left the unasked-for twist of lemon curling around the rim of my glass, and I walked. I did not know where I was going.

I was actually surprised when I found out that I was on Lexington Avenue. Surprised, but not confused. Lexington rang its bell at once and I knew where I was and why, and I only hoped she wasn’t busy with a customer.

I stopped for a drink on the way. Then I stopped again, this time in a liquor store, and I asked the clerk for a bottle of Vat 69. He gave it to me and took my money and I waltzed out into the street again.

The desk clerk at her hotel called her on the phone. “Let me talk to him,” she must have said, because he presented me with the receiver and I held it to my ear.

“Harvey,” she said, sounding pleased. Her voice was a throaty whisper. “Honey, can you come back in half an hour? Or forty-five minutes, that would be better. I’m busy right now, honey, but forty-five minutes—”

I found a bar for the forty-five minutes. I felt silly, paying bar prices for liquor with a paper bag full of better liquor at my foot. I felt even sillier, waiting for three quarters of an hour to see a girl I’d seen that afternoon, waiting until my friend, who happened to be a whore, got rid of her guest, who could only be a customer. I drank a little more than I’d planned on drinking and when I left the bar and returned to the hotel, exactly forty-five minutes after I had talked to her, I was pretty well stoned.

The desk clerk recognized me, called up, spoke softly for a moment or three, and gave me the nod. The elevator took me to her floor and her door was open, her face smiling at me.

“Harvey,” she said, looking at me oddly. “Is something wrong, baby?”

“Long time no see,” I muttered vacantly. I poured myself into her room and her arms swallowed me.