Sin Hellcat

Seven

I’ve never been to Brazil before,” said the moppet.

“Golly,” I said.

“Harvey, I’m sorry,” said Jodi, of the furrowed brow.

“My name’s Everett,” said the urchin.

“Who asked you?” I asked him.

“Now, Harv,” said Jodi. “It isn’t his fault.”

“Everett Whittington,” said the talking albatross.

“Hail and farewell, Everett Whittington.” I told him and, to Jodi: “Remember me to the gang.”

“Harvey, please!”

My hand on the doorknob, I made the biggest mistake of my entire life. I turned about, and I looked at them. I looked into the trusting innocent saucer eyes of the five-year-old kiddie kargo, and I looked into the pleading promising deep-well eyes of Jodi, and I was lost. Lost lost losterooneyed.

I undid my fingers from around the doorknob, and I sighed an all-is-lost-anyway sigh, and I went over to the nearest chair and I sat down. “All right,” I said. “All right.”

“You aren’t going to run out on me, Harvey, are you?”

“No, Jodi, I suppose I’m not.”

“You’re a funny man, mister.”

“Contraband,” I told him, “should be seen and not heard.”

That broke him up. He thought that was the funniest thing since the Three Stooges. He slapped his little knee and whooped in his little falsetto and generally overacted all over the room.

“You know,” I said into the racket, “if I’d had a child five years ago, he’d be just about your age now. And that’s the strongest argument for celibacy I’ve ever heard of.”

But I was lying. There was an even stronger argument, had he but known it. And the argument’s name was Helen.

Helen. I married her, if you recall. I recall, worse luck.

Bermuda bound we were, on one of those Technicolor cruise ships, with a crew entirely composed of gigolos, and passengers from Central Casting. The Captain was a humdrum middle-aged fag, than which there is nothing sadder, and the third night out I saw Charon pass us, smirking up his sleeve.

But I wanted to tell you about the first night out, though I hardly know why. Some masochistic desire within me for public humiliation, I suppose. Herewith, therefore, the tale of my virgin bride and I upon our wedding night, heading southward through the glistening seas o’er the turning orb toward the beauteous pearl of the Atlantic, Bermuda, tourist trap of the British Commonwealth, where wealth is common and so are the British. Very common. In more ways than one.

But I digress. Perhaps I don’t really want to tell you about my wedding night. Nevertheless, I’ve promised, and so I’ll do it. I really will.

That day, our wedding day, had been hectic from dawn to dusk, with split-second timing being the rule throughout. The wedding had started at precisely such-and-such — attended primarily by office friends from her office and my office — and had finished at exactly thus-and-so, in order for the reception to commence here and end there, so that the two of us could whisk away to the pier and board our vessel of delight specifically at then, milliseconds before the gangplank was taken away and the vessel of delight drifted away from Manhattan Island, southbound for a warmer but not really much different island, seven hundred miles away.

Honeymooners, of course, made up a large part of the passenger complement aboard the ship, intermixed with intermixers of various kinds and sexes, divorcees anxious for another try, kept boys and kept girls and kept tweeners looking for somebody to keep them, single girls and boys looking for romance (which is the ladies’ word for sex), and even a couple of fussy British retirees who’d apparently been playing tourist in New York and were now homeward bound to Bermuda. Greener pastures and all that, and their presence did make everybody else look a little silly. At least, I thought so. No one else seemed to notice the irony at all. But, after the first night, I must admit that I had an eye for irony.

After all the timetable rushing around of the wedding day, it was good at first to simply sit and relax awhile aboard the ship. Manhattan Island, that crowded three-dimensional Monopoly board fell away to the stern, and the rolling ocean rose up before us to the horizon. We wandered around on deck, hand in hand, watching the sun go down, looking at our fellow passengers, and generally breathing deeply and getting ourselves unjangled.

You could pick out the newlyweds with absolutely no trouble at all. The grooms all looked gently lustful, as though mentally practicing the line, “I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.” And the brides all looked apprehensively lustful, as though they didn’t believe it.

I don’t know for sure whether Helen and I could have been spotted as newlyweds or not. It depends, I suppose, on how much showed on my face. Nothing at all showed on hers, that much I’m sure of. At the time, I thought it was simply unusual control. I didn’t realize that it was a perfectly accurate portrayal of what was on the inside. Nothing, in other words.

As to me, my feelings weren’t precisely those reflected on the faces around me. I was lustful, certainly, but there was nothing gentle about my feelings at all. I didn’t much care at that point whether I hurt her or not. I had been biding my time for far too long, had been respecting her maidenhood and maidenhead till a few mumbled and overpriced words had been said over us, and now I was anxious to get to it, get at it, and get with it. I wouldn’t say that I was lustful; I would say I was rapacious.

At the same time, a kind of contented lethargy — you’ve seen that on the faces of the cows on the Carnation milk cans — had come over her. After all this waiting and all this preparation and all this buildup, at last it was mine, it was legitimately and completely and exclusively mine, and there wasn’t any particular hurry in demonstrating my proprietary control. We could relax a while from the exertions of the day, we could stroll the deck, we could take our time and take it slow, knowing that soon or late what I had come here for would be mine, all mine, mine, mine, mine.

I have the feeling, then, that the expression on my face was that of a sex maniac with a low metabolic rate. I looked, I imagine, insatiable but calm. And since Helen had no expression at all on her lovely physiogoomy. Gods knows what our combination looked like. Trilby and Svengali, maybe.

Yeah, well let me tell you something. I was Trilby.

At any rate, we roamed the deck anon and anon, and around us the ranks of newlyweds diminished. A gently lustful groom would all at once grab the hand of his apprehensively lustful bride, and the two would scuttle away toward their cabin, hips already awag. This couple so departed, and that couple, and that couple over there, and gradually the decks emptied of their panting cargo, leaving only the singletons — none of whom would be making out that well this first night out — and the returning Britishers, who wanted nothing more than to sit morosely on deck chairs and think about how they’d been taken in New York.

Until finally there wasn’t a newlywed to be seen. Except for Svengali and me, I mean. And I at last suggested that we make the retreat complete. “What do you say?” I murmured in my true love’s ear. “Shall we, ah, go below?”

“Oh, but look at the ocean,” she said, turning away from me and pointing out away from the ship. “Look at it in the moonlight.”

“Let’s look at it through our cabin porthole,” I suggested.

“I think I’m hungry,” she said.

“I know I’m hungry,” I told her. “Let’s go to our cabin.”

“I wonder if the dining room is open,” she said. “Or do they have a snack bar or something like that?”

Maidenly modesty, I thought. Virginal apprehension. I thought it was cute, this big and lovely girl, so well-endowed for calisthenics of the kind I was envisioning, as delicate and innocent as Her Wedding Night. I really thought it was cute.

At the same time. I had to admit to myself that it was somewhat irritating. I had been patient. I had been patient through courtship and engagement, and I had been patient through an overlong ceremony, and I had been patient through the reception. I had been patient during the waning of the afternoon and evening aboard this ship, allowing us both plenty of time to be rested up for the labors ahead, and it seemed to me that the time had come when patience ought to step aside for action to take over.

These two attitudes, indulgence and impatience, combined within me to cancel one another out and leave only compromise. “All right,” I said. I even smiled, making the best of it. “As a matter of fact, I’m kind of hungry myself. Let’s see what we can get to eat, before we go down to the cabin.”

“Fine, Harvey.” She gave me that beautiful smile of hers, and linked her arm in mine, and off we went in search of edibles.

As it turned out, there was something like a snack bar, adjunct to the cocktail lounge. We had sandwiches, and I plied my darling with daiquiris, on the theory that alcohol makes the heart grow fonder, and warms the virgin blood. I wolfed my sandwich, and she hesitated over hers, and at last our dining and drinking were done, and back on deck we were, for more staring at the sea.

Another hour of this, promenading on the nearly deserted deck, and I was beginning to get just a wee impatient. Every blasted time I importuned my darling about coming down to our cabin for some fun and games, she played sightseeing guide some more, pointing at this and that, exclaiming over one sight or another, and generally changing the subject by the simple method of beating it over the head. This got to be a little strained after a while — face it, there’s a paucity of varied sights in mid-ocean — and at last I took the bull by the horns — that isn’t quite right, is it? — and said, “Listen, Helen, it’s time for us to go down to the cabin. Now, I understand, you’re nervous and all that, but the time has come. Believe me, I’ll be understanding and I’ll be gentle and I’ll be sympathetic, but we just can’t stall around any longer.”

She raised a hand, as though to point out a particularly charming whitecap to the westward, but then she seemed to think better of it. Her hand drooped, and she turned reluctantly to gaze at me, and she nodded her lovely head “You’re right, Harvey,” she said. “It’s got to happen sometime. We might as well get it over with.”

“Of course,” I said, too delighted by her acquiescence to see the snapper in that sentence. Any of the snappers.

Snapper number one: When you say you might as well get something over with, you’re talking about something distasteful, that you aren’t looking forward to at all, in any way shape or form.

Snapper number two: When you say you might as well get something over with, you’re talking about something you have to do once. After that, it’s over with, it’s done, you don’t have to do it anymore.

Snapper number three: When you say you might as well get something over with, you’re talking about something you aren’t going to enjoy and something nobody around you is going to enjoy.

There are more snappers in there, but those three will do for a starter. The point being that I didn’t notice any of them. I just lit up like a pinball machine, and escorted my baby away from the deck and down the long narrow hall to our wee cabin.

Where Helen all of a sudden found a whole new vista of things to point at. We hadn’t been to our cabin before — a steward or somebody had delivered our luggage, and we’d stayed up on deck ever since boarding the ship — and Helen just couldn’t get over the place. She kept saying, “Oh, look at—” and pointing at things. She pointed at the portholes, and the Mae Wests, and the leaping-fish paintings on the walls. She pointed at the chairs, and the bureau, and the writing desk. She pointed at the carpet, and the lamps, and the doorknobs, and the light switch, and everything else she could think of.

She did not point at the bed.

I kissed her. I had to grab her and turn her around in order to do so, but I managed it, and I kissed her, and for the duration of the kiss she was still. She didn’t respond at all, she was merely subservient and passive. For the duration of the kiss. And then she was off again.

I finally allowed my irritation to take command. “Now, hold it a goddamn minute, Helen,” I said. “Maidenly hesitation is all very well, but let’s quit fooling around. At this rate, our grandchildren will be grown up before we start their parents. Now, come on.”

“We have to unpack,” she said hurriedly. Our luggage was on the bed, and that was the only reason she went anywhere near that particular piece of furniture. She hurried over to the bed, and bent over, and proceeded to open a suitcase.

I goosed her. I goosed her a good one. After all that while, believe me, I had to do something.

She jumped a mile, and when she spun around to face me there was nothing on her face but outrage. “Harvey!” she cried. “How dare you! How could you?”

“It was easy,” I said. “I extended my middle finger like this, see, and then I took aim like this, and then I—”

“Harvey, what has gotten into you?”

“Nothing compared to what’s going to get into you if you’ll only settle down for a goddamn minute.”

“Harvey, I want our wedding night to be perfect.”

“And I want it to be tonight.’

“It will be, Harvey, don’t be so impatient for Heaven’s sake.”

“We’ve been married seven hours, Helen. Other people have consummated their marriages half a dozen times by now. We really ought to take care of it at least once, you know what I mean?”

“We will, Harvey, honestly. Don’t you think I know how you feel?” (Another snapper I missed at the time: How I felt, not how we felt. The reason being that she didn’t feel anything. Then or ever.)

“If you know how I feel,” I said, missing the snapper, “then come over here and let’s get going.”

“Darling, all I want to do is get ready for you. Unpack our luggage, so we’ll have a nice room, and put on that beautiful nightgown I picked out for just this occasion, and be really ready for you.”

“I’m really ready for you,” I told her.

“It won’t be long, Harvey,” she said. “Honestly.”

“When won’t it be? It is now.”

She looked puzzled. “What?”

“Never mind. How much longer am I supposed to wait?”

“Oh, please don’t be angry, Harvey dear. Don’t spoil things.”

“There isn’t anything to spoil, yet,” I said. I was growing surly, and I knew it, but I felt that I had some justification.

“Darling,” she said, “I tell you what. You go back out on deck—”

“What?”

“Please, now, listen to me. You go back out on deck, for half an hour. I’ll get the cabin ready, and myself ready, and when you come back everything will be perfect. All right?”

“All right,” I said. Anything, to be assured of a time limit on the stalling. “Half an hour it is,” I said. “Let’s synchronize our watches.”

“Oh, don’t be silly.”

So I wasn’t silly. I left the cabin like a good boy, and went back up on deck, and wandered around, looking at my watch every thirty seconds or so, and waited for the half hour to go by.

As I walked, my thoughts quite naturally were sexual in nature. And, since I had not yet tasted the joys of union with Helen, I had no choice but to fall back on my memories of the other women in my life, those who had preceded Helen as my bedmates. They included the tall and the short, the lean and the not-so-lean, the good-looking and the better-looking. There were the slow and passive receivers of the male, the fast and furious engulfers, and a host of variations in between. There were all kinds of girls, and I thought about them all, and I thought about the act which had bound me to each of them and which had given them all something in common, and then I thought about Helen. And I looked at my watch again, and fourteen minutes had gone by.

I thought about Helen. My activities in the past with those other human females would be of the same approximate type as my activities in the to-be-hoped-for immediate future with Helen, so I combined memory with imagination with my knowledge of Helen’s appearance, and long before I ever got into Helen’s bed in actuality I had done so a gross of times in my mind. We would do thus, and then we would do so, and then we would do suchandsuch. It was fine in imagining, but it would be far far better in reality.

That’s what I thought.

At any rate, thirty minutes oozed by at last, and I streaked back to the cabin, moving like one of those cartoon characters on television; nothing but a cloud of dust and a rifle-like twang! And there I was at the cabin door.

At the locked cabin door.

I knocked on the door. “Helen,” I called. “It’s me. It’s Harvey. Unlock the door.”

“Not yet!” she cried, and there was a touch of desperation in her voice. “I’m not ready yet! Come back in half an hour!”

“I already have,” I announced. “Your half hour is up. It’s time to drop the coin in the slot, baby.”

“Not yet, not yet!”

“God damn it!” I pounded on the door with both fists, shouting, “Open up this door, Helen! Enough is enough!”

Then a muttonchops Britisher and his frau came down the hall, looking at me with ill-concealed astonishment, and I ceased and desisted from battering at the door. I offered our friends in NATO a weakish grin, and they went on by in seemly haste, not looking back.

Once they were gene, I took to kicking the door, shouting Helen’s name amid imprecations. Then a few other doors up and down the hall opened, and some irate sleepers told me where to head in. I bitched back at them, being mad enough by then to want to hit anybody within range, and it looked for a while as though a dandy Donneybrook would get going in that hallway, without even John Wayne or Victor McLaglen to give the thing the proper feeling.

Until a ship’s officer, called for by someone or other, put in an appearance and wanted to know, in clipped British monosyllables, just what the hell was going on around here. What the devil is what he actually said, if I remember it all right.

Well, of course, everybody answered him at once for a while, and it was impossible to get his attention, much less explain the situation to him. So I took the easy way out. I ignored them all, and went back to kicking the door again. That got me the officer’s attention, and when he demanded of me specifically just what the devil was going on, I replied, “You I’ll tell. These rubbernecks here can go to hell for themselves.”

“He started it all,” announced a snippy-type woman, pointing at me. I made a gesture at her involving a specific adjustment of the fingers of the right hand, and she looked shocked.

“All right,” said the officer, “all right now. Let’s just clear the hall here. I’ll take care of things. If you good people will return to your cabins now, I assure you there will be no more noise. Just move along now, please, back to your cabins, that’s it.”

They finally did all go back where they belonged, leaving the officer and I alone in the hallway. “Now, then,” he said, turning back to me. “Just what seems to be the ruckus here?”

“My wife and I,” I told him, “just got married today, just before we boarded this ship. And now she’s locked herself in our cabin, and she won’t let me in. I mean, uh, she won’t let me in the cabin. That, either. She won’t let me, in other words. Anything.”

“I see,” he said. I suddenly had the impression that this sort of thing had happened on this particular ship more than once in the past. He covered his amusement well, considering, and acted promptly and properly, as though there were a tried and true Standard Operating Procedure for this sort of situation. I could see it; Manual on Procedure when Faced with a Groom whose Bride has just Locked him out of their Connubial Cabin.

The procedure was a simple one, all in all. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a ring of keys, selected the one he wanted, and unlocked the cabin door. “If you want,” he said sotto voce, “I can have a bottle of something or other sent along to you.”

“Thank you anyway,” I said, rather grimly. “We won’t be needing anything at all. Not for quite a while.”

“Righto, sir,” he said. “Oh, and by the by. This does happen, you know. Try not to be too angry with the lady. They get skittish.”

“So do I,” I said. “Thank you, and good night.”

But it wasn’t good night to the good officer just yet. A moment later I had to chase down the hall after him and bring him back to unlock the bathroom door. Helen just wouldn’t give up.

When he left this time, I marched into the bathroom and confronted my reluctant bride. She stood cowering in a corner, fully dressed. I had already noted the fact that the luggage, still unpacked, had not been moved from the bed. Just what the hell had she been doing down here for the last half hour? Not that it mattered. She’d be doing something else for the next half hour.

My bride’s first words to her returning husband were, “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!”

“I’m going to do a hell of a lot more than touch you, baby,” I told her grimly. And then I told her some more. Graphically, in specific Anglo-Saxon detail, I told her exactly what I intended to do to her, what I expected her to do to me, and what we would be doing together.

She covered her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut. She cringed into the corner. She did her damnedest to squeeze through the wall and escape.

But there wasn’t any escape. I ripped her clothing off, not because I wanted to rip her clothing off but because I didn’t have any choice. She was doing her damnedest to keep her clothing on.

I’ve always wanted to punch Helen’s mother in the nose. Unfortunately, the old witch is dead, and I don’t have the energy to dig her up just to punch her posthumously. At any rate, she was one of those mothers who spends her entire life figuratively sewing her daughter up. Sex, in Helen’s household, was the second syllable of a two-syllable English name. That’s all it was. Things of the body were revolting, all and every. Family members had to apologize to one another whenever they sneezed, had to leave the room to blow their noses, had to be sure no one was looking before they scratched. Banishment was the only punishment possible for someone who broke wind. They all made believe that they didn’t excrete, and Helen still had a sneaking suspicion that the stork bit was the actual truth about her birth after all.

This shapely sack of horrors was then presented to me as marriageable, and I fell for it. I married it. And all of a sudden Helen realized that she had gotten herself into the worst horror of all. I didn’t merely intend to sneeze in front of her, oh, no. I had this plan to violate her. You’ve heard the word. Violate. Yecch.

Violate the witch I did, too. In the bathtub. She hopped into it, and wouldn’t get out of it, so by God I hopped in after her.

Once in the tub, I grabbed her nearest knee and yanked. She flipped from a sitting position in the corner to a prone position on her back, her legs all balled up against me.

I readjusted them, and she tried to get them together again. So I reached over and smacked her open-handed across the face, and then she stopped kicking and just stared at me, unmoving.

I held her knees apart, and all at once she started fighting like a wildcat. She scratched and bit and punched and butted, she writhed around trying to keep me from finding my objective, and she generally gave me a bad time.

I gave her a worse one. Making a girl in a bathtub isn’t all that easy anyway, even if she’s willing. If she’s opposed, it’s next to impossible. And if she’s a virgin and therefore more than normally difficult to get at, it becomes totally impossible.

So I did the impossible.

I kept my weight on her, hampering her defenses, and every time she punched me I punched her twice, every time she bit me I bit her harder, and all the while I slammed a battering ram at the closed and bolted gate of the city. I hit the city walls as often as I hit the gate, but I had determination, and when a man has enough determination there are times when he can do the impossible after all, like the poem says.

The city fell.

And it was a ghost town.

Once Helen realized the battle was all over, the city had fallen, she suddenly quit. Completely. She just up and stopped. She lay there like a board. That beautiful body, so cleverly muscled to afford the finest in nocturnal pleasure, just lay there beneath me like a corpse. She might just as well have been alone, for all the effect I had on her.

And when it was all over, she refused to talk to me. She wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence for the next two days. And we were at Bermuda before we ever tried it again.

I’ve got to say this much for Helen, the second time she actually did try. The whole thing revolted her, but she put on the stiff upper lip and did her best not to show it.

And that selfsame night I became an adulterer for the first time, with a young lady named Linda Holmes, a bikini-clad beach girl with all the right equipment and all the right attitudes, whose mother had apparently minded her own business, which is as unusual as it is delightful.

So that, in essence, was my wedding night. My first wedding night. Is it any wonder I leaped at the opportunity to have another chance at a wedding night? No, it isn’t any wonder at all.

Of course, you win a little and you lose a little. Helen had not culminated our wedding night with the presentation of a five-year-old boy. I mean, there’s always that consolation.

On the other hand, Jodi did. Looking apologetic and worried, but nevertheless fatalistic, she presented me with a five-year-old boy, name of Everett Whittington, and she asked me quite seriously to smuggle him out of the country and down to South America and into Brazil.

Having traded banter with the moppet for a few minutes, I sat down in Jodi’s living room for some heavy thinking and some heavy smoking. Jodi sat across from me, still looking worried, but also looking hopeful now, and the tad scampered around like an innocent five-year-old.

The wretch.

At last, I said, “Tell me straight, Jodi. Is this a kidnapping?”

She shook her head. “No, it isn’t. Al promised me it wasn’t. It isn’t anything like that at all.”

“I mean, kidnapping is bad enough if you just take the kid across a state line. If you take him across national boundaries, God knows what they’re liable to do to you.”

“It isn’t anything like that,” she said.

“Then what is it?”

She took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you as much as Al told me,” she said.